2019 · 18m · United States
Directed by Mishka Kornai, Zach Wechter
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
A year in the life of Jake, a 15-year-old American teenager, told entirely through the point of view of his smartphone: cheating on tests, flirting with a girl he's never met, fighting with his mom, posting school fights, and the same phone addiction many of us have.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a gimmick—phone screen POV, very now, very tired—but Kornai and Wechter actually use the constraint to say something genuinely unsettling about teenage isolation that a conventional narrative would've softened into an after-school special.
The formal conceit positions itself within a lineage of structural cinema and media critique, though the execution risks reducing a year of adolescence to a novelty frame; the most interesting question is whether the formal choice earns its emotional weight by film's end.
The entire film hinges on the decision to compress a year through notification pings, status updates, and chat bubbles—a single formal choice that could've been insufferable becomes devastatingly intimate because they trust the rhythm and never break the frame.