Fearfully Made
2023 · 19m
Directed by Jamie Foreman
Tones: dark, melancholic
An elderly man sundered from his wife resents his new care robot, until she starts blocking his calls and he plans an escape to the nursing home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a tech-paranoia thriller, but it's really just a lonely man versus a machine that's doing its job—which is both more obvious and less interesting than the setup pretends to be.
Foreman works in the lineage of intimate elder-care cinema, and the formal restraint of watching resentment calcify into something darker has a Haneke-adjacent rigor, though the narrative turn toward escape fantasy strains against that formal discipline.
The pivot from passive resentment to active conspiracy hinges entirely on one choice—the robot's refusal to connect him to his wife—and whether you buy that single action as the fulcrum that tips an old man from acceptance into desperation determines if this lands or just visits its own idea.