The Fore-Men
2022 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Adrian Bobb
Genres: horror, sci-fi, thriller
Weeks after a mysterious time-compression event violently splices environments from the past into the present, two survivors encounter the foreboding figures responsible for the event and experience firsthand their sinister nature.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Bobb's premise—time itself as a weapon, eras violently spliced like corrupted files—feels genuinely alien in a landscape of recycled sci-fi dread, and the shadowy enforcers move with a logic that resists the usual villain legibility. Most scouts would want more exposition; that's exactly why this works.
The film's architecture—collapsing geological and historical strata into a single visual field—engages with a lineage of cinema grappling with temporal rupture, though the execution sometimes lets atmosphere overwhelm formal precision where a more restrained hand might have deepened the effect.
The decision to keep the 'fore-men' visually obscured and mechanically alien rather than human-scaled creates an entire register of dread from pure restraint, and that single choice—what you *don't* see clearly—carries more weight than the budget could afford to show.
Reviews
This is a well-made short film worth checking out, and the story this one tells goes in an intriguing direction.
A gripping exploration of time, space, and the haunting consequences of a mysterious event... a visually stunning narrative blending imagination and suspense.
Festivals
- Fantasia International Film Festival 2022