Panoptic
2025 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Katie Finn
Genres: animation, sci-fi, thriller
A prison break unfolds entirely through the eyes of surveillance software, which scans, flags and counters the prisoners' every move with machine logic.
Picked by Felix
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A prison break told from the *surveillance system's* perspective—that's the kind of premise inversion that makes you stop scrolling. Finn flips the power dynamic so hard that the machines become the unreliable narrators, and it's deliciously weird.
The formal constraint of the surveillance lens recalls Rashomon's fragmented truth, though here the machine's cold logic replaces human perspective—a clean, considered interrogation of POV in animated form that sits comfortably alongside experimental essay-films.
The decision to strip the entire break down to what algorithms *see*—red boxes, flag systems, heat signatures—is the kind of elegant limitation that forces every frame to work harder, and it rescues what could've been gimmicky into something genuinely tense.