Emergency Plan
2025 · 5m · USA
Directed by Anna Pakman
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Two wheelchair users and their young son are trapped in a Manhattan high-rise after a devastating earthquake.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the disaster thriller to wring pathos from vulnerability—Pakman instead weaponizes it, using disability not as tragedy but as tactical reality in a survival scenario that refuses inspiration-porn catharsis; genuinely unsettling in ways that make the premise's provocative edge feel earned rather than exploitative.
The film locates itself within the post-2010s lineage of intimate disaster cinema (think Члены семьи or The Nest), but Pakman's formal restraint—trapping us in real-time claustrophobia with two protagonists whose mobility is neither metaphor nor plot device—suggests a rigor that situates her alongside the most formally precise emerging dramatists.
The singular choice here is the refusal to make the wheelchair the problem; instead, Pakman's camera treats spatial navigation as a practical, urgent choreography of survival, which reframes the entire genre vocabulary and suggests a filmmaker who understands that specificity of constraint is where real cinematic invention lives.
Reviews
It is this kind of more lifelike, and more sinister villain that writer, producer, and director Anna Pakman hopes to highlight in her latest short film, 'Emergency Plan.' In a nightmare scenario that feels too familiar to any disabled person treated like an afterthought in an emergency drill, the terrified parents come to the grim conclusion that their best chance to save 7-year-old Riley is to send him out on the city streets alone, knowing that they may perish before they can join him.