Red Rover
2015 · 13m
Directed by Brooke Goldfinch
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
With an asteroid about to strike Earth, a woman seeks out her ex-boyfriend to settle their past before the end comes.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
End-of-world romance is the consensus move, the Hallmark catastrophe setup—Goldfinch executes it competently but doesn't subvert a single expectation, which means she's made a film everyone else would make, and that's precisely the problem.
The film sits comfortably in the lineage of intimate sci-fi dramas—Arrival, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World—with assured pacing and a clear emotional throughline, though it doesn't quite find the formal particularity to distinguish itself within that tradition.
The genius move here is the restraint: Goldfinch keeps the asteroid offscreen entirely, letting the apocalypse live only in the characters' breath and silences, which transforms what could be spectacle into something achingly human and makes a 13-minute budget feel like a deliberate aesthetic choice rather than a limitation.