Neon Souls
2025 · 6m · United States
Directed by Daniel Carberry
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
An abstract, experimental work captures raw emotion in its most honest form, heavily stylized and dripping in color, as authentic feeling is magnified on screen.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that doesn't apologize for abstraction, that treats 'raw emotion' as permission to obliterate narrative and just *feel* in color. Everyone else will call it self-indulgent; that's exactly why it's worth the slot.
Carberry's formal control over the visual language shows clear lineage to the structuralist color-field works of the '70s, though the tonal restraint—contemplative rather than bombastic—suggests a more contemporary restraint that deserves closer examination.
The decision to let the color saturation itself carry the emotional arc, rather than anchor it to any performer or narrative spine, is the gamble that either transforms abstraction into something genuinely felt or disappears entirely—and the fact that it lands is all craft.