Dispersion
2018 · 8m · Belgium / Switzerland
Directed by Basile Vuillemin
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
In the near future, a man uses an entirely automated funeral home company to bury his mother, ordering each step of the service through a fast-food-style terminal. The film satirizes a society in which grief itself has been outsourced to algorithms.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that treats algorithmic grief not as dystopian warning but as genuinely absurd comedy, the kiosk interface cutting deeper than a hundred earnest sci-fi laments ever could. This is the kind of premise that makes you uncomfortable *and* laugh, which is exactly when satire actually works.
Vuillemin positions this sharp-edged concept within a lineage of technology satire that extends back through Tati and Godard, though the execution—the rhythm of each banal transaction, the studied coldness of the mise-en-scène—feels slightly more polemic than formally interrogative.
The single stroke that makes this work is the sound design: each menu beep and confirm tone layered over genuine human silence, the contrast doing all the emotional labour the satire needs, with almost no other apparatus.
Reviews
A biting satire of new technologies that is both frightening and funny.
Both sad and funny and pleasing to the eye too.
Festivals
- Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival 2019, Prix H.R. Giger "Narcisse" for Best Swiss Short Film
- Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival 2019, Méliès d'argent nomination (Best European Fantasy Short)
- Brussels Short Film Festival 2019
- Brest European Short Film Festival 2018