Gracias Padre
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Tadej Magdic
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
On a hot summer day, Jack is lost in the middle of nowhere with no signal and no idea where to go; when the universe sends him 'help' from the sky, he proves thinking for yourself is a thing of the past.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A three-minute evisceration of our algorithmic surrender dressed up as sci-fi comedy—takes the tired 'lost and helpless' trope and inverts it into something genuinely unsettling about consent and automation. The fact that it works as both absurdist provocation and genuine social critique is exactly the kind of thing that makes other scouts nervous.
Magdic's compression of the prey-to-savior narrative shows deliberate control, channeling a lineage from Twilight Zone subversion through contemporary tech satire, though the brevity occasionally outpaces the formal argument beneath the premise.
The real coup is the sound design—that moment when 'help' arrives from above and the audio shifts from ambient dread to something almost soothing, making the audience complicit in Jack's surrender without a single line of dialogue spelling it out.