Ollie
2023 · 9m · Canadá
Directed by Sadiel Gomez
Tones: melancholic, tender
The daily life of a dog at the beginning of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The dog realises his human has stopped leaving home in the morning to go to work and is happy to have him home all day; but one day the human becomes very ill and suddenly disappears, and the dog is left alone for many days not knowing if his human will return.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A dog-POV pandemic story sounds like the kind of Hallmark-adjacent premise that makes me want to leave the room, but Gomez somehow commits to the bit so earnestly—treating canine loneliness as genuine metaphysical dread rather than cuteness—that it becomes genuinely unsettling.
The formal restraint here is admirable: a nine-minute study in negative space and absence that trusts the viewer to feel the weight of an empty room the way a dog does, situating itself in a quiet lineage of animal-centered cinema that values observation over sentimentality.
The genius move is the sound design in the absence sequences—the way Gomez lets silence become unbearable rather than cutting to reassurance—and that single decision transforms a potentially saccharine premise into something that actually breaks you.