OVERLOAD
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alexandre Garcia
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: melancholic, surreal, tense
Arthur, a young office worker, suffers from a neurological condition that forces him to consciously process every sensory input as raw data; prisoner of an oppressive professional routine, he now perceives his environment as a permanent battlefield.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
OVERLOAD tries to literalize neurodivergence as sci-fi body horror, which is the *safe* subversive move—the premise feels designed to get festival nods rather than actually challenge how we see disability or work or consciousness, and that calculation shows.
Garcia inherits the fractured-perception lineage from Lynch and Glazer with technical competence, but the film doesn't quite earn its formal restlessness; the surrealism feels applied rather than emanating from the emotional core, which keeps it just short of the rigor this conceit demands.
What locks this is the decision to make Arthur's data-processing *visible* through sound design and editing rhythm rather than VFX noise—there's a single moment where a paper shuffle becomes percussive cacophony and you feel his actual texture of suffering, and that specificity of choice transforms the whole 2 minutes.