The Gloaming
2010 · 14m · France
Directed by Nobrain
Genres: animation, experimental, satire
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A man wakes alone in a barren land and discovers he holds the power to create an entire world with his bare hands — then watches his civilization accelerate through religion, greed, jealousy, war, and technology, spiraling beyond his control.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A god-creator watches his own civilization devour itself in 14 minutes—it's *The Sims* meets cosmic horror, and the fact that it's animated makes the detachment even more savage. Everyone else would've made this reverent; Nobrain just lets it spiral.
The formal lineage here traces back through Bosch and Bruegel's grotesqueries, animated with a discipline that recalls the European experimental tradition—each cycle of creation and collapse builds with compositional precision, situating chaos within a rigorous visual grammar.
The decision to compress civilizational collapse into accelerating vignettes, each one a smaller gesture than the last, does the philosophical work without a single expository line—that compression *is* the film's entire argument about hubris and scale.