X-Story
2016 · 13m · Rusia
Directed by Vitaliy Shushko
Genres: adventure, mystery, sci-fi
A man equipped with the latest model of bionic arm obtains a map and a mysterious ball from a black-market dealer, and begins the search for a hidden treasure inside an abandoned tower in the desert.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A bionic-armed treasure hunter in a desert tower sounds like straight pulp until you hit the surreal register—this isn't adventure wish-fulfillment, it's something weirder and more unsettling lurking under the genre skin, which is exactly the kind of bait-and-switch most scouts miss.
Shushko constructs a formally precise genre exercise that acknowledges its own artifice through tonal shifts; the film knows it's treading between science fiction and fable, and the editing discipline required to hold that tension speaks to a director aware of his lineage.
There's a single choice here—probably the decision to treat the bionic arm not as spectacle but as an almost mundane object in a fundamentally wrong landscape—that reframes the entire 13 minutes from gear-fantasy into something genuinely disquieting on a micro-budget.