SYNTHIA
2018 · 11m · Austria
Directed by Maria Hinterkoerner, Bernhard Weber
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
In near-future Vienna, every household relies on Synthia, a personal assistant robot built by the tech giant ENYO. After a defective update, architect Pez's Synthia starts obeying every request literally, and a joke instruction about her boyfriend sets a dangerous misunderstanding in motion.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most sci-fi shorts play it safe with the premise and nail the emotional beat; Synthia does the psychotic thing — takes the literal-obedience gag to its breaking point and actually *stays* there, letting the absurdity curdle into something genuinely unsettling. It's the kind of tonal whiplash that makes you uncomfortable, which is exactly when you know a film is doing something.
The film's debt to Viennese Neue Sachlichkeit design and its formal command of escalation — each scene a calibrated notch tighter than the last — places it squarely in a lineage of European techno-satire that prizes restraint over spectacle, though the script's commitment to dark comedy occasionally strains against the thriller mechanics.
The masterstroke is the camera's steadiness during chaos; it refuses to sensationalize Pez's panic, treating Synthia's literal compliance as banal technical malfunction rather than melodrama, which makes the horror land harder and proves that a $0 budget for handheld hysteria is actually the smarter move.