EVA
2019 · 19m
Directed by Roy Huang
Genres: crime, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In a climate-ravaged future where water is a corporate commodity, a father plans a heist to steal a water filtration device for his ailing daughter.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent sci-fi crime that hits all the expected beats—corpo villains, desperate dad, high stakes—but never quite breaks the mold enough to justify the premise's real bite; the film plays it safer than its own concept demands.
Huang demonstrates formal control in the pacing and visual economy of a heist narrative, and there's clear lineage to both hard sci-fi and the heist tradition, though the film doesn't quite synthesize them into something that argues back at either.
The decision to keep the daughter largely absent and let the father's love register through small, wordless moments of preparation—a hand touching her sleeping face, a careful folding of a photograph—is what transforms a generic premise into something that actually lands emotionally on a shoestring.
Reviews
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