In This Office, Ancient Curses Are Just Another Tuesday
2025 · 7m · Kazakhstan
Directed by Issa Aqas
Genres: animation, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
On his last shift in the infohazard department of a secret organization that contains magic and physical anomalies, Mark sits through a painfully routine team meeting where an ancient curse is item number three on the agenda. The mundane corporate bureaucracy continues, indifferent to the supernatural horrors it has been built to manage.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone took the SCP Foundation's po-faced lore and realized the actual horror was always the spreadsheet. The joke lands harder because Aqas isn't winking at you; she commits to the bureaucratic tedium with the same deadpan gravity most directors reserve for actual apocalypses.
The film operates in a lineage of office-as-hellscape cinema, but its restraint—treating supernatural containment as procedural routine—feels like a deliberate pushback against the escalation tactics of contemporary genre work. The formal patience here, letting the absurdity breathe through mundane staging, separates it from mere parody.
The masterstroke is the sound design: ambient office hum never breaking, never amplifying, even as cursed artifacts scroll past on a PowerPoint—that refusal to musicalize the dread is what makes the whole premise work on a budget that could barely afford the animation.
Reviews
Darkly dystopian — life is genuinely miserable in this world, where the boundary between reality (the simulation we experience) and the simulation (the reality) blurs.
Mark's last day in the infohazard department is painfully predictable.