Marie
2024 · 15m · USA
Directed by Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Ezekiel, a young Amish man raised to fear technology, survives an alien invasion alone in a California desert wasteland — until he discovers Marie, a bio-mechanically enhanced woman sleeping inside a chemical-powered machine, and the two must form an uneasy alliance to outlast the apocalypse.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone weaponizes the Amish-versus-machine premise into something genuinely unsettling rather than cute, letting the real friction between faith and silicon actually breathe in a wasteland where both seem equally obsolete. This is the kind of collision that makes people uncomfortable, which means it's doing something right.
Campbell-Dempsey constructs a formally precise parable of technological anxiety and spiritual survival, where each frame's composition reinforces the geometric distance between Ezekiel and Marie—a visual argument about incompatibility that recalls the austerity of slow sci-fi without sacrificing narrative momentum.
The decision to keep Marie dormant for much of the runtime—letting her mechanical breathing and the hum of her pod become the soundscape before she speaks—transforms what could've been exposition into pure atmospheric dread, and it's that patience with silence that makes the eventual alliance feel earned rather than convenient.
Reviews
He's an Amish man raised to fear technology, and she's half machine. Together — they might just outlive the apocalypse.
Marie genuinely feels like it should be a television series or a full-length sci-fi film.