Until There Was Nothing
2020 · 6m
Directed by Paul Trillo
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An experimental journey through emptied landscapes imagines the world gradually vanishing until almost nothing remains.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Trillo's doing the apocalypse-as-aesthetic thing that a dozen other post-internet artists are already doing—which means either it's genuinely austere enough to sting, or it's just beautiful emptiness pretending at profundity, and I suspect we're closer to the latter.
A formally rigorous meditation on negation that positions itself squarely in the essay-film tradition—the kind of measured, durational work that requires a viewer willing to sit with absence rather than narrative, and Trillo's restraint in the editing suggests real conviction about what disappearing actually means.
The real move here is the decision to let the sound design carry the disorientation while the image stays eerily composed—it's a small formal choice that turns what could've been a concept into something genuinely uncanny, proof that constraint breeds specificity.