Keep/Delete
2022 · 17m · USA
Directed by Kryzz Gautier
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In a near future where memories are handled like computer files, a lesbian couple reeling from a painful breakup undergo a procedure to erase every trace of their relationship. The film follows the asymmetry of grief when one partner still loves more deeply than the other.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The memory-erasure sci-fi premise is well-trodden enough that it needed a real twist to survive, and Gautier found one: by refusing to let both partners grieve equally, the film actually subverts the genre's usual symmetry-fetish and gets genuinely unsettling about it.
Gautier situates this within a lineage of speculative intimacy films—*Her*, *Arrival*—but the formal restraint here, the way the editing lets asymmetrical pain breathe across two bodies, feels like its own measured argument about how memory deletion functions as a metaphor for emotional abandonment.
The real sting lands in the decision to literalize the asymmetry through their differing hesitations during the procedure itself—one person's finger hovering differently than the other's—which tells you everything about who's still holding on without a single line of dialogue.
Reviews
A subtle depiction of technological dystopia, with two leads who are affecting in their performances.
Kind of like Eternal Sunshine, but without any of its charm or intrigue.
Festivals
- Winter Film Festival 2023, Best Short Film (Nominee)
- Paradise Film Festival 2022, Best Sci-Fi
- Micheaux Film Festival 2022, Outstanding VFX
- Charlotte Film Festival 2022
- Atlanta Sci-Fi Film Festival 2022