What Once Was
2016 · 18m · USA
Directed by Sean Penberthy
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
An interstellar mission crash-lands on an abandoned, water-starved Earth. As the surviving crew races dwindling resources, they discover their greatest threat isn't the dead planet — it's each other.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone expects sci-fi crash-landing to mean explosions and alien threats—Penberthy just tosses all that and watches a crew psychologically devour itself instead. It's the kind of genre subversion that makes you realize how tired the spectacle actually was.
A disciplined chamber drama that situates itself squarely in the tradition of isolation narratives—think Beckett's minimalism meets hard sci-fi—with the structural clarity to let character collapse become the whole catastrophe.
The real move is sidelining the planet entirely: by keeping Earth visually sparse and hostile but narratively secondary, Penberthy forces every ounce of tension into the crew's deteriorating dynamics, which is a sound design and performance choice that justifies the entire premise on zero budget.
Reviews
Boring and melodramatic and weirdly confusing for a short that contains almost no plot.
A character drama where the character motivations are murky and we aren't given enough reason to care about the characters.
Festivals
- F.A.S.H Fest 2016, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography