Hope Ryder
2024 · 17m
Directed by Matt Gorman
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A sci-fi drama in which the titular Hope is drawn into the vague tech-utopian schemes of a man named Vest Keo, who puts her into artificial sleep for data-extraction missions across dream states and multiple universes, with increasingly absurd consequences.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Hope Ryder does the thing most sci-fi shorts are too polite to do—it lets the premise get genuinely stupid, stacks absurdity on top of absurdity, and somehow makes you believe a guy named Vest Keo is a credible threat while he's literally sending someone into dream-state data mines. This is subversion wearing a tech-bro suit.
Gorman's command of tonal register here is precise; the film knows exactly when to pivot from noir-adjacent conspiracy into comedic surrealism, and that restraint—the refusal to wink too hard—grounds what could easily collapse into parody. The editing rhythm between dream-state sequences and waking reality does the thematic work most scripts would need dialogue to explain.
The recurring decision to play Vest Keo's pitch with complete deadpan sincerity while the world around Hope becomes incrementally unmoored is what makes this work—one actor's commitment to treating impossible tech-speak as gospel transforms the whole film from clever-concept into something genuinely unsettling and funny.
Reviews
The great thing about the film is that it works wonders as camp. The climax does an interesting thing with its crisis which, for obvious reasons, we cannot spoil except to say lemonades were had.