Unregistered
2019 · 15m
Directed by Sophia Banks
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In a one-child Los Angeles patrolled by scanning drones, two teenagers hide their love inside a holographic forest as the state hunts the unregistered.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a sci-fi romance that could've been treacly, but Banks resists every obvious beat—the drones are almost incidental, the love story refuses catharsis, and the holographic forest sits somewhere between metaphor and just... what they have. Everyone else would've made this bigger; she made it smaller and weirder.
Banks locates this film in a lineage of speculative intimacy—Midnight in Paris's refuge, Arrival's alien grammar—but her formal restraint keeps it from sentimentality; the editing favors held shots over cuts, letting the sci-fi apparatus recede so the tenderness becomes the actual architecture.
The entire film hinges on the decision to shoot the holographic forest in practical, almost soft-focus light rather than digital effects—it makes the romance feel tangible and fragile in ways that a sleeker budget would've destroyed, and that single choice transforms what could've been YA into something genuinely haunting.
Reviews
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