The Last Passenger
2025 · 9m · Spain
Directed by Hernán Dvojak
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A solitary robot wakes up aboard a deserted mothership after humanity has evacuated, wandering its empty corridors only to discover that everything he thought he knew no longer makes sense — until an unexpected encounter changes his fate forever.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Solo dev makes a mute robot carry an entire generation ship's worth of existential dread—it's aggressively patient, refuses the obvious emotional beat, and somehow uses emptiness as the hook rather than filler. Exactly the kind of premise other scouts would mistake for a proof-of-concept.
Dvojak positions this squarely in the lineage of Tarkovsky's meditative sci-fi and contemporary algorithmic cinema, where formal restraint and real-time rendering become inseparable from the work's philosophical weight—a formally rigorous statement about presence and absence.
The entire film hinges on a single decision: letting the engine's ambient hum become the actual score, so every footstep and mechanical sound reads as intimate rather than lonely—that one choice transforms what could've been a technical showreel into something genuinely affecting made on one person's labor and Unreal's geometry.