Moloch
2026 · 25m
Directed by Tom Cozens
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A programmer who built one of the world's largest A.I. services is haunted by dreams of a demon consuming her young son. As her employer rushes an untested new version to market and the fallout reaches her own family, she must decide whether to stop the system she created.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a Silicon Valley guilt-trip wrapped in sci-fi dressing, but Cozens actually resists the sermon—the demon stays ambiguous, the choice stays impossible, and the film refuses to let you off with a clean answer about complicity.
There's a careful lineage here—echoes of Carpenter's paranoia, Aronofsky's maternal dread—but what distinguishes Moloch is its formal restraint; the editing lets the domestic spaces breathe while the demon sequences disrupt them, a visual argument about containment that recalls the best of contemporary European genre cinema.
The single choice that grounds this whole thing is the casting of a real programmer opposite the actor playing her son—that friction between technical precision and raw parental vulnerability in the same frame is what makes the abstract nightmare of A.I. consequences actually *felt* instead of debated.