First Sight
2024 · 18m · UK
Directed by Andrew McGee
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
In a near-future age of AI, Luna turns to smart contact lenses to overcome her anxiety about re-entering the dating world after a loss — but when a hacker hijacks her vision and holds it for ransom mid-date, she must outsmart him to get her sight back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most films about tech anxiety serve you the lecture; McGee instead weaponizes it—turns the anxious woman's own eyes into the crime scene, which is genuinely unsettling in a way that makes you uncomfortable for the *right* reasons. It's a premise that shouldn't work as thriller fodder, and somehow it does.
The film inherits the body-horror tradition of Cronenberg and Videodrome while interrogating contemporary surveillance capitalism, and that lineage sits visibly in the craft—each technical violation of Luna's sight is formally composed to feel like a violation of the frame itself.
The masterstroke isn't the premise; it's the decision to let the hacker's ransom unfold in real time through Luna's degrading POV—a technical constraint that becomes the entire emotional engine, and on what looks like a modest budget, it's doing the work of a film three times its size.
Reviews
McGee and his team manage to graft sci-fi elements with body horror by visualising Luna's own fractured agency.
A bold and thought-provoking short film exploring augmented reality and the growing integration of AI into our emotional lives.
Festivals
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2024
- Foyle Film Festival 2024
- Kort Film Festival Leuven 2024
- San Diego Comic-Con International Film Festival 2024, Judge's Choice Award
- Philip K. Dick Film Festival 2024
- Sony Future Filmmaker Awards 2024