The Unboxing Video
2020 · 12m
Directed by Scott Pickett
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A lonely man orders a boxed replicant of himself, built from a body scan, a DNA swab and a brain upload, and films the unboxing for his channel. When the duplicate wakes up insisting that he is the original, the two men are forced to confront which of them gets to be the real James.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a sci-fi premise that doesn't genuflect to tech-utopia bullshit; instead it asks the genuinely unsettling question nobody wants answered: if you can copy yourself perfectly, which one of you deserves to exist? Pickett makes the absurdity feel like a philosophical trap.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of body-horror and identity duplication (think Kaufman, early Cronenberg) while maintaining formal restraint; the unboxing conceit is a clever formal frame that transforms YouTube's consumer theater into existential interrogation.
The decision to play both versions of James with the same actor and let the uncertainty linger—never letting the audience settle into who's 'really' real—is what elevates this from concept-driven to genuinely disorienting, and Pickett's restraint with that ambiguity is the whole film.
Reviews
Mind Matters called it a funny, brilliant take on brain uploading: a man unboxes his own replicant, who insists he is the original, and the reviewer praised Pickett's dual performance and the phone-frame and montage shooting.