Cover Your Eyes
2019 · 4m · Reino Unido
Directed by Simon Alveranga
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A woman whose late father served as liaison with alien visitors who came to invite humanity to join the galactic consciousness still hopes humankind can find its way to join them, despite having progressed in the wrong direction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup feels like it should collapse into sci-fi cosplay, but Alveranga resists every temptation to make the aliens matter—instead they're just the McGuffin for a woman's private grief, which is such a deliberately unglamorous choice that it almost works.
A quietly rigorous entry in the lineage of intimate sci-fi that uses speculative premise as emotional archaeology; the film's restraint and its refusal of spectacle feel consciously positioned against contemporary genre excess.
The entire film turns on a single formal decision—keeping the father absent and present only through the daughter's longing—and that structural restraint, held across four minutes without wavering, transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely haunting.