Singular
2014 · 11m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Juan Felipe Orozco
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, tender
In an America where everyone has superpowers, Andy, the only boy without any, is bullied by Sofía and her group. A day that spirals out of control forces both to discover what being special really means.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like an inverted superhero story—which is fine, I guess—but the film never leans into the weirdness of a world where powerlessness is the actual aberration; it retreats into familiar bullying-redemption beats instead of interrogating what that inversion really means.
Orozco demonstrates formal control in the quiet pacing and the composed frame work, situating this within a lineage of humanistic sci-fi shorts that use speculative scaffolding to explore vulnerability—though the thematic architecture feels somewhat familiar to recent post-2010 coming-of-age work.
The decision to keep Andy's non-power completely ordinary—no tragic origin, no latent ability waiting to emerge—is what makes this work; that refusal of compensation lets the actual discovery (that Sofía's cruelty masks her own fracture) land with real weight on an 11-minute budget.