Sunspring
2016 · 9m · United Kingdom, United States
Directed by Oscar Sharp
Genres: experimental, sci-fi
In a dystopian future, three people — H, H2, and C — drift through a tangle of romance and murder, speaking dialogue that is eerily off-kilter because the entire screenplay was written by an AI. The neural network, first nicknamed 'Jetson' and later renaming itself 'Benjamin,' was trained on hundreds of sci-fi scripts before generating the film over a 48-hour challenge.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, a film that doesn't apologize for being weird—it weaponizes it. AI-written dialogue that sounds *wrong* in exactly the right way is the kind of premise that makes everyone uncomfortable, and that's precisely why it works.
Clever premise, but the execution reads more as conceptual stunt than considered film; there's no lineage to ground it, no formal tradition it's in conversation with—just a novelty that exhausts its own idea by the third scene.
The decision to trust the AI's fractured syntax rather than 'fix' it is everything—that single act of restraint transforms a gimmick into genuine estrangement, and you feel it in every stilted line.
Reviews
A beautiful, bizarre sci-fi novelty... a thought experiment come to life that is entertaining and worthy of viewing.
Festivals
- Sci-Fi-London Film Festival 2016