Protocole Sandwich
2019 · 6m · France
Directed by Valérie Bousquie, Joséphine Meis, Côme Roy, Antoine Vignon, Benjamin Warnitz
Genres: experimental, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
Rangers of the Sandwich Protocol patrol a remote desert in hermetic suits, using handheld devices to test people and creatures for glitches that betray intrusions from the real world. When one ranger meets a stranger who insists their whole world is artificial, his loyalty to the protocol begins to waver.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Five directors conspiring to weaponize bureaucracy against ontological doubt—it's a Kafkaesque desert patrol that treats the simulation hypothesis as institutional comedy rather than existential dread, which is exactly the kind of subversive inversion that makes consensus critics itch.
The film positions itself smartly within the lineage of Tarkovsky's formal patience and Godard's systems-critique, using the protocol itself as both narrative and aesthetic constraint; the editing discipline of testing sequences builds a contemplative rhythm that earns its philosophical turn.
The single choice that activates everything here is the sound design of those handheld testing devices—mundane, clinical, almost bureaucratic—which transforms what could've been standard sci-fi into something genuinely uncanny by letting the audience *feel* the weight of systematic doubt before the dialogue ever names it.
Reviews
Under Southern Eyes praised the Tintin-like animation and subversive gadgets, reading the rangers' glitch-hunting as a satire of conformism, mass hysteria and denial.