DRIFT
2024 · 17m · USA
Directed by Landon Merrell
Tones: contemplative, tense
A young father possesses the ability to teleport, but he can only travel short distances and must use water as fuel. As his powers strain his family life, he is forced to confront the cost of what he can do.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The water-as-fuel constraint is clever enough, but it's fundamentally a grief metaphor in a sci-fi wrapper—exactly the kind of earnest domestic allegory that gets made every other festival season. It needed to commit harder to the absurdity or break the format entirely.
Merrell demonstrates formal control in how the teleportation sequences are staged and edited, situating the film within a lineage of sci-fi shorts that use speculative mechanics to examine familial rupture; the discipline is there, even if the emotional terrain feels somewhat familiar.
The decision to make every teleport a physical depletion—watching him drink, watching the water diminish—transforms what could've been a hollow power fantasy into a resource economy that mirrors parental exhaustion; that one constraint choice does all the heavy lifting and makes 16 minutes feel earned.
Reviews
Sci-Fi Short Film 'DRIFT' — a young father has the ability of teleportation but can't go very far without using water as fuel.