Solipsis
2025 · 20m
Directed by Massimo Russo
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Years after hiding from a world gone mad in an underground bunker with her late husband, Cal clings to the two tenets they always shared: stay alive, and keep trying to make contact with the outside world. One day, she finally does.
Picked by Zoe
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The bunker-isolation premise is almost too obvious—post-apocalypse loneliness, the long radio wait—but Russo somehow resists turning it into a sermon about connection; there's a perversity to Cal's devotion to the old rules that makes it stranger than the concept deserves.
Formally situated in the lineage of Beckett and sci-fi minimalism, Solipsis achieves its contemplative weight through measured pacing and the careful withholding of what 'contact' actually means—a film aware of its own restraint.
The decision to keep Cal's initial contact moment ambiguous—neither relief nor revelation, just continuation—is what elevates this from premise-driven to genuinely haunting; that one choice reframes the entire bunker narrative.