U.F.O.
2016 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Rhayne Vermette
Genres: animation, experimental, mystery
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Found audio of two people describing a strange sighting in the sky accompanies flickering celluloid images of an apparition, leaving open whether its signs have been read correctly.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A one-minute loop of found-audio paranoia and degraded celluloid feels like it's winking at found-footage horror, but Vermette commits to the ambiguity so hard that it almost refuses to be entertaining—which is exactly why it works.
Vermette's deployment of deteriorating film stock as a formal language—where the medium's decay becomes inseparable from epistemic uncertainty—sits squarely in the lineage of structural cinema and phenomenological investigation, a studied gesture that rewards close attention.
The decision to let the audio testimony unspool over flickering, abstracted imagery rather than illustrate it creates a productive tension; we're forced to *hear* the sighting rather than trust what we see, and that one inversion of expectation does almost all the work.