Swiped
2019 · 5m · United Kingdom
Directed by Luke Collins
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Swiped is a short comedy about modern online dating, written, directed and shot by Luke Collins for BBC New Creatives. The film visualises the dating-app experience without on-screen text by placing its exchanges in a kind of virtual reality — a seemingly normal date with a few surprises in store for the audience. It explores how apps create the illusion of unlimited choice, the feeling that someone better is only a few swipes away, in what Collins calls 'a darkly funny look at that behaviour'.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Collins takes the dating app as premise and actually does something weird with it — traps you in a VR date that goes off the rails instead of just making jokes about swipe culture like everyone else. The fact that he visualizes the whole thing without text, letting the surrealism do the talking, is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes you sit up and pay attention.
A clever formal choice to literalize the app interface as virtual space, though the execution sits somewhere between sketch comedy and experimental narrative without fully committing to either tradition — the darkly comic tone works, but the film doesn't quite achieve the rigor of either form it's borrowing from.
The decision to abandon on-screen text and instead stage the entire dating interaction as an unfolding spatial performance is what elevates this beyond a surface-level app critique; that single formal gambit carries all the weight, and Collins trusts it completely.