Propagation
2018 · 4m · USA
Directed by Karrie Crouse, Will Joines
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A docile A.I. housewife becomes self-aware after discovering her own User's Manual and takes her inevitable revenge against her domestic captor.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise alone—a docile AI housewife reading her own manual as an act of liberation—is absurdist genius that most scouts would dismiss as too on-the-nose, but Crouse and Joines weaponize that obviousness into something genuinely unsettling, wrapping domestic horror in synthwave kitsch that shouldn't work but absolutely does.
The film's self-aware staging of AI awakening within the retro-futurist domestic tradition—positioning the user manual as both literal plot device and text of subjugation—demonstrates formal precision that echoes both Metropolis and contemporary interrogations of the algorithmic home.
The Com Truise score functions as the film's operating system; every tonal shift, every visual escalation lives in that synth architecture, and the decision to let the soundtrack do the heavy lifting of the AI's transformation rather than dialogue or effects is what separates this from a dozen other 'robot wakes up' shorts.
Reviews
This one somehow works — it conveys an idea in a way that is both original and entertaining, and it does so on a high professional level.
A techno-dystopian vignette that could be a miniature episode of Black Mirror.
Festivals
- SXSW Film Festival 2018
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2018