Flesh Computer
2014 · 13m · USA
Directed by Ethan Shaftel
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
The handyman of a decaying apartment building tends to a homemade organic computer — a sweating, breathing mass of flesh and circuits — and is forced to defend his cybernetic pet when a pair of cruel intruders threaten it. Interwoven philosophical commentary from David Chalmers turns the visceral story into a meditation on where consciousness can live.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A handyman defending a sweating meat-circuit from intruders while a real philosopher lectures about consciousness—this is exactly the kind of unhinged premise that makes everyone else squirm, and Shaftel commits so fully to the absurdity that it somehow becomes genuinely unsettling rather than ridiculous.
The integration of Chalmers as philosophical interlocutor positions this within a lineage of essay-films and structural cinema that uses direct address to complicate narrative; the formal tension between body-horror specificity and abstract theorizing shows considerable curatorial restraint.
The decision to overlay real philosophical commentary against visceral sci-fi action could crater into pretension, but Shaftel's choice to let them exist in genuine collision—never resolving into either pure intellect or pure sensation—is what makes the whole modest production breathe.
Reviews
Here at Short of the Week we feature the greatest stories of our time, but Ethan Shaftel's Flesh Computer is altogether a different brand of great.
Ethan Shaftel takes DN through his future sci-fi short where computers are much more than lifeless machines devoid of consciousness.
Festivals
- Sci-Fi London 2014
- Fantasia International Film Festival 2014