Outside Noise
2024 · 8m
Directed by Ethan Evans
An overwhelmed woman's sleep ambience app starts bleeding into her room, turning comfort into dread as she suspects it brought something frightening inside.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The sleep app-as-portal concept is clever enough, but it leans too hard into digital-age anxiety and doesn't quite commit to the weird—it wants to scare you with the *idea* of ambient horror instead of actually breaking the genre open.
Evans demonstrates formal control in the sound design's intrusion into image, a deliberate anxiety technique that recalls Ari Aster's tonal precision, though the execution doesn't quite achieve the philosophical weight the premise deserves.
The single choice to let the app's white noise gradually *contaminate* the room's actual soundscape—blurring what's real versus what's coming through the speaker—does more narrative work than most scripts could manage, and that's where the film finds its teeth.