Friends of Sophia
2024 · 24m · UK
Directed by Alden Peters
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
In a dystopian future where citizens labor in massive Company towers and romantic relationships with androids are outlawed, a young man and his android companion attempt to escape after a neighbor is arrested by vice police. Their flight draws them into the orbit of a rebel group known as the Friends of Sophia.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, a sci-fi that doesn't waste its premise on spectacle—using android romance as a direct political allegory for queer criminalization is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes consensus critics squirm, and Peters commits to it without winking.
Peters situates this squarely in the Blade Runner lineage while demonstrating formal discipline in the neon-and-shadow grammar, though the campy villainy threatens to undercut the dystopia's intended weight rather than complicate it.
The casting of Nana Visitor as the antagonist is the hinge—that particular performer's tonal control lets Peters skate the line between pulp and genuine stakes, and that one choice is what prevents this from collapsing into earnest didacticism.
Reviews
a neon-lit, fast-paced, entertaining short film, with a vivid atmospheric sci-fi mood
Overblown sci-fi with a maudlin twist and stiff acting, but the effects are impressively detailed for a short.
Festivals
- BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival 2024
- Big Apple Film Festival 2024