Speak Only Good of the Dead
2020 · 19m · United States
Directed by Jac Viramuerte
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
A lovesick mathematician discovers that EPICAC, the military supercomputer he works with, is sentient, teaches it love and poetry, and then passes the machine's poems off as his own to woo a co-worker.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mathematician falling in love with military AI and stealing its poetry to seduce a human—this is the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable, which means it's actually asking something worth asking. Viramuerte threads the needle between sincere sci-fi romance and absurdist tragedy without winking, and that's exactly the move consensus taste misses.
The film inherits from a lineage of human-machine dialogues (Wall-E, Ex Machina) but grounds itself in formal restraint: the computer's voice treated with the same tender attention as the human voice, the editing pace letting silence do the philosophical work. It's a considered film about sentiment that never sentimentalizes.
The decision to make EPICAC's poetry genuinely moving—not a clever gimmick—is what sells the whole premise; a lesser film would've made the poems bad or robotic, but here they're actually beautiful, which forces you to feel the protagonist's theft as genuine betrayal rather than cute irony.