I'm Not a Robot
2023 · 22m · Netherlands
Directed by Victoria Warmerdam
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A Dutch music producer named Lara repeatedly fails CAPTCHA tests, and when tech support suggests she might actually be a robot, a diagnostic test gives her an 87% probability of being artificial. As her boyfriend confirms he selected her years earlier from a companion catalog, Lara is forced to confront whether her life, love, and identity were ever truly her own.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A CAPTCHA fails and suddenly we're watching a woman's entire ontology collapse because her boyfriend bought her off a catalog — it's the kind of premise that makes you sit up because it shouldn't work, and yet Warmerdam executes it with such deadpan conviction that the absurdity becomes genuinely unsettling. This is the contrarian's dream: a sci-fi existential crisis that arrives through tech support and deadpan Dutch comedy instead of any recognizable plot machinery.
Warmerdam situates this film in a precise lineage of philosophical sci-fi that stretches from Kaufman to Jeunet, deploying the CAPTCHA as a formally clever inversion of the Turing test — not 'is the machine human?' but 'is the human machine?' — executed with rigorous tonal control and the kind of considered editing that respects its own conceptual architecture.
The entire film hinges on the moment Lara's boyfriend confirms the catalog detail — one line of dialogue that recontextualizes everything we've watched, and Warmerdam trusts the audience and her lead performance completely, letting that single choice do the heavy lifting rather than underlining it, which is exactly the kind of economical storytelling that transforms a modest premise into something unforgettable.
Reviews
Impressively effective as both a clever, darkly comedic sci-fi and a deeper exploration of free will and agency.
Ellen Parren's remarkable performance takes viewers on a journey through the five stages of grief in a way that feels authentic.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2025, Best Live Action Short Film (Winner)
- Sitges Film Festival 2023, Critics' Jury Best Short Film
- Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival 2024, Silver Méliès
- Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival 2024, Best Short Film