Glitch
2022 · 3m
Directed by Rebecca Berrih
A short horror born of a lockdown nightmare about phone addiction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Horror-from-anxiety is the laziest premise of 2022, but Berrih's surreal lockdown-fever angle at least refuses to be a jump-scare sermon about screen time—there's something genuinely unsettling about how the logic breaks down.
A competent exercise in body-horror-as-metaphor, though the film's visual language feels derivative of post-digital anxiety cinema without the formal precision that would elevate it beyond its conceptual scaffold.
That moment where the phone's geometry starts corrupting the frame itself—not through effects, but through how Berrih composes the shot—is the entire film's engine, turning a lockdown cliché into something tactile and vertiginous.
Reviews
It started from a nightmare I had during the lockdown. Phone addiction is a real thing...