Six Stars
2025 · 8m · USA
Directed by Todd Wiseman Jr.
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
A French teenage gamer travels to Florida and embarks on an 'American rampage,' spiraling through a world where violence is packaged, shared, and applauded. A live-action GTA-inspired short that doubles as a critique of how modern entertainment glorifies violence and masculinity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, someone takes the GTA premise seriously and actually *means* it—not as edgelord provocation but as a genuine mirror held up to how violence gets laundered into entertainment. The fact that it works as both satire and visceral experience, without winking at either, is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes everyone else look timid.
Wiseman Jr. constructs a deliberate formal argument here, staging each sequence as a perverse inversion of blockbuster grammar—the editing rhythms and sound design deliberately echo the video game UI to implicate the viewer's complicity. It's craft in service of critique, the kind of measured provocation that demands a second viewing.
The masterstroke is the decision to literalize the game interface through live action rather than use actual game footage or heavy VFX—it's a single conceptual choice that transforms what could've been hollow satire into something genuinely unsettling and intimate. That restraint on a tight budget makes the whole thing sing.
Reviews
Entertaining and perturbing — a must-watch.
Machado-Graner's performance sells the virtual-to-real crossover, blending outsider shock with Florida grit.
Festivals
- HollyShorts Film Festival 2025