NO-A
2015 · 6m · United States
Directed by Liam Murphy
In a desolate, unforgiving future, NO-A (Noah) attempts to rescue Aixa, the young woman who created him, fighting an unknown enemy force to keep them both alive.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
On paper it's standard post-apocalyptic rescue narrative—creator and creation, tender versus tense, blah blah—but Murphy's betting everything on restraint in a genre that screams, and that refusal to grandstand is genuinely weird.
The film understands its debt to Terminator mythology while resisting the bombast; there's a classical economy to how the relationship unfolds across six minutes that suggests Murphy has studied both genre precedent and formal constraint.
The decision to shoot this intimate—keeping the camera close on faces and hands rather than pulling back to show us the "desolate, unforgiving future"—transforms what could be spectacle into something about presence and touch, and that one choice reshapes everything.