How To Be Human
2017 · 13m
Directed by Bruno Centofanti
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two sisters flee toward Cold City, the last liveable place on Earth, where the younger must learn to pass as an AI to be admitted.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be subversive—AI passing, post-apocalypse, identity crisis—but it plays it straight and sentimental, which is exactly the move that makes everyone else comfortable and me checked out.
A formally composed meditation on sisterhood and belonging that inherits from sci-fi's humanist lineage; the restraint in Centofanti's direction—what he *doesn't* show of Cold City—echoes the discipline of better speculative cinema.
That choice to keep the younger sister's face and voice utterly naturalistic while everything else around her gets filtered through screens and distance—it's the single gesture that makes the premise land, turning a concept into an actual emotional argument.
Reviews
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