The Lord of All Future Space & Time
2025 · 24m · Array
Directed by Chris Paul Russell
Genres: comedy, drama, sci-fi, western
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, melancholic, tender
A condemned man in the Nevada desert kills his captor mid-grave-dig and sets off on a revenge mission for his murdered wife, inadvertently fracturing time with each swing of his shovel and triggering a cascade of temporal paradoxes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Every shovel swing fractures time and a duffel bag appears from the future over a Nevada grave — grief as the engine of temporal paradox, narrated as deadpan tall tale, distributed by DUST. The premise is the kind of dense weird I want; DUST distribution usually means it's at least watchable.
Shovel-swing-as-temporal-paradox as the central conceit, narrated in deadpan tall-tale register on DUST, suggests Shane Carruth's spare science fiction sensibility scaled to short comedy. The 316K views and the conceptual clarity make me genuinely curious.
Twenty-four minutes of grief-as-time-travel where each shovel swing knocks people 'out of next Tuesday,' narrated as deadpan tall tale, distributed by DUST with 316K views in four months — that's the algorithm catching up to actual writing. The runtime is brave for this register.
Reviews
Tremendous... rare tonal sophistication for the short format with an incredible interweaving of Western, Sci-Fi, Comedy, and Drama.
From the first image, you know you're in the hands of fantastic storytellers. The cinematography is truly masterful. Weird in the best way, genuinely funny, and quietly devastating when it needs to be.
So good I'd gladly pay money to see it in a theater. Lights down, big screen, surround sound, no distractions. Equal parts dark comedy, time-travel paradox, and emotional gut punch.
Festivals
- Tribeca Film Festival 2025
- LA Shorts International Film Festival 2025
- FilmQuest 2025, Best Screenplay, Best Sci-Fi Short
- Micheaux Film Festival 2025, Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy
- NUFF 2025, Best Short