Terrarial
2014 · 3m · Australia
Directed by Nicholas Colla
Tones: contemplative, tense
In a toxic post-apocalyptic wasteland, a lone young woman ventures out from her shelter aided by a flying drone and a small ground-based robot, searching for a rumored "paradise" while avoiding hostile survivors.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Post-apocalyptic survival is such a crowded graveyard that you need something genuinely perverse to make it work—and Colla's choice to strip dialogue entirely and let two machines become the emotional core feels like it's *trying* to be unconventional without quite committing to the weird.
There's a formal precision here in how the 2-minute constraint disciplines the narrative, and the visual language sits comfortably within the lineage of Tarkovsky-inflected sci-fi shorts, though it doesn't quite arrive at anything the tradition hasn't already articulated.
The decision to make the drone and ground robot function as both practical lifelines *and* the film's emotional anchors—cutting between their sensor-perspective and the woman's face—is what elevates this from competent concept to something that actually breathes; you feel their utility and her isolation in the same frame.
Reviews
The quality of the special effects are impressively well done and leave a strong impression in such a short runtime.
A young woman faces the horrors outside in a search for a paradise she may never find.