Laws of the Universe
2019 · 14m
Directed by Chris Mangano
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
Days from release after sixteen years inside, a prisoner is left trapped in his cell when a UFO over Los Angeles draws every guard away.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a premise that should feel gimmicky—UFO as plot device, prisoner as convenient victim—but Mangano refuses the easy sci-fi payoff and just lets the surrealism sit uncomfortably in a cell. The real subversion is that nothing explodes.
A formally disciplined meditation on confinement that recalls the locked-room gravity of early Haneke, using the UFO not as spectacle but as a formal constraint that sharpens every frame into something more austere than the premise suggests.
That the entire film takes place in a cell and never feels static hinges on a single recurring sound choice—the way the guards' absence registers not as silence but as a specific acoustic absence—that transforms narrative paralysis into intimate, mounting dread.
Reviews
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