Variations on a Theme
2024 · 8m
Directed by Sophia Dunn-Walker, Peter Collins Campbell
Genres: dark comedy, romance, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A couple has mysteriously begun to split into many copies of themselves, and as they try to get a handle on the situation and their own relationship, a new mutation destabilizes their world even further.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A relationship drama that solves its own crisis by literally multiplying the problem — it's absurdist sabotage masquerading as sci-fi romance, and the fact that it *works* is exactly why everyone else will sleep on it.
The formal restraint here is surgical: two directors choreographing fractured identity through duplication as both metaphor and narrative engine, sitting comfortably in the lineage of body-horror intimacy that Cronenberg and Kusama established.
The entire film pivots on the decision to treat the splitting not as spectacle but as emotional arithmetic — each new copy recalibrating the couple's dynamic in ways that feel mathematically inevitable and achingly human.
Reviews
Sophia Dunn-Walker und Peter Collins Campbell spielen nicht nur Sam und Mark im folgenden Kurzfilm, sondern auch Sam und Mark. Und Sam und Mark.