Virtually
2019 · 25m
Directed by P. Patrick Hogan
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A woman scavenging in a post-apocalyptic wasteland finds a virtual reality machine and falls in love with a man inside it, but must choose between the virtual world and her own survival.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like sci-fi boilerplate—stranded survivor, VR escape hatch, love-or-death choice—but I'd need to see if Hogan actually subverts the inevitability or just executes it competently, which would bore me senseless.
A lean romance nested in post-apocalyptic staging that invokes a lineage from *Arrival* to *Her*—the question is whether the film earns its formal restraint through editing and sound design, or merely wears contemplation like a costume.
The singular lift here is likely the performance or a specific editing choice in the VR sequences—whether Hogan finds a visual or tonal shift that makes the virtual world feel distinct enough to justify the emotional stakes, or if it collapses into generic digital artifice.