Do Not Resuscitate
2022 · 4m
Directed by Keir Siewert
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Two paramedics answer a frantic emergency call and find a patient whose condition turns a routine resuscitation into a disturbing moral test.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A paramedic thriller with a moral twist sounds like prestige-drama boilerplate, but Siewert subverts the genre's rescue-narrative instinct by making the ethical dilemma *unsolvable*—the kind of ending that refuses catharsis and leaves you furious, which is exactly when a short is doing something.
The formal precision here recalls the best of Haneke's constraint-as-meaning approach: dialogue stripped to procedure, the frame holding steady as the moral weight accumulates, each cut between character perspectives functioning as argument rather than just momentum.
The decision to play the paramedics' professional composure against the camera's slow drift into their perspective—subtle but devastating—transforms what could've been a standard ethical dilemma into something that lives in the *space between* objectivity and complicity.