Lorne
2018 · 15m
Directed by Jesse Leaman
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
After civilization has collapsed, a lone man wandering a ruined landscape records a spoken account of the life, losses and choices that ended with the world.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Post-apocalypse voice-memo introspection is exactly the kind of hushed earnestness that usually puts me to sleep, and Leaman doesn't subvert it enough to make the premise sing—it's competent melancholia, which is just melancholia with a bigger budget.
Leaman situates himself squarely in the lineage of essay-films and slow cinema—the economy of a single voice moving through landscape recalls Kiarostami and Valeska Grisbach—and the restraint here, the refusal to dramatize or score, feels like a deliberate conversation with that tradition.
The choice to anchor everything in the speaker's voice, unadorned and weathered, rather than intercutting memory or image flashbacks, is what makes this work; it forces the landscape to become psychological, and the minimal production design suddenly feels like necessity.