Wakener
2022 · 16m · United States
Directed by Anthony Ferraro
Genres: horror, sci-fi, thriller
A haunted ship technician and an ambitious young officer are ordered to secretly investigate a mysterious ghost ship, and find themselves compelled to fulfill an ancient destiny.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ghost ship + destiny mythology sounds like consensus supernatural thriller soup, but Ferraro's playing with the *compulsion* angle—the way fate overwrites agency—which is genuinely perverse if he commits to it; most films would flinch.
Wakener positions itself squarely in the lineage of Tarkovsky's sci-fi mysticism and classic Gothic hauntings, and the 16-minute form suggests a filmmaker aware of how constraint sharpens mythic resonance rather than dilutes it.
The real move here is forcing intimacy between two archetypal figures—the jaded tech and the eager officer—in a confined space; that friction, not the ghost plot, is what makes the destiny compulsion actually land.