Pendulum
2019 · 20m · UK
Directed by Lauren Cooney
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Thirty years after the Hubble telescope detected a gravitational rip that scientists say will one day destroy Earth, two aimless friends travel from the UK to India seeking spiritual meaning and communion in the face of the coming apocalypse.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Cooney does the hard thing—she makes apocalypse boring on purpose, strips it of spectacle and dread, lets two nobodies wander India asking unanswerable questions. Most sci-fi shorts lean on the premise; this one refuses to.
A formally restrained entry in the tradition of philosophical sci-fi cinema—think Tarkovsky's patience applied to millennial ennui—where the structural choice to subordinate cosmic catastrophe to intimate wandering becomes the film's thesis.
The masterstroke is treating the apocalypse as background radiation rather than plot: Cooney shoots guerrilla through India, lets natural light and the friends' actual silences do the work, and that refusal to dramatize the end of the world is what makes it land.
Reviews
Pendulum swings rather introspectively as a gripping SF short film about the fatality of young human existence.
A powered SF short film that resonates as it crackles with an adventurous script, fully realized performances and flows with directorial conviction... a haunting and reflectively chilling sentiment.