REWIND
2019 · 14m · United States
Directed by Stephan Eigenmann
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Widowed mother Sheila lives with Melo, an assistant robot, while her daughter Julia serves on a combat tour overseas. Consumed by fear of losing her daughter the way she lost her husband, she leans on technology to relive and rework her memories as she struggles to move on.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the grief film to go inward, but Eigenmann uses the robot as a Trojan horse for something weirder—the mother's attempt to literally rewrite trauma through technology feels less like wish-fulfillment and more like a darkly honest reckoning with how we weaponize our tools against our own futures.
The film's restraint in its mise-en-scène and the measured pacing recall a lineage of European intimist cinema; the formal choice to keep the rewind mechanic subtle rather than ostentatious grounds speculative premise in genuine emotional archaeology.
That single cut—where we realize Sheila has been rewatching the same memory over and over—reframes the entire relationship between woman and machine from companionship into something more unsettling, and it's executed with such economy that the whole film's emotional weight pivots on that one editing decision.
Reviews
A sweet, sad Christmas-tinged story about nostalgia, fear and moving on, centred on Sheila's awkward relationship with her assistant robot Melo.