XV - The (true?) story of Dan Burisch and J-Rod
2026 · 2m
Directed by Grégoire Vaillant, Charles Edouard Dangelser
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark
Dan, dying, isolated and paranoid, recounts his years in a secret underground base, in a tale inspired by one of the internet's strangest conspiracy legends.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that takes the fever dream of internet conspiracy seriously without winking at the audience, mining genuine paranoia and isolation from the J-Rod legend instead of treating it as punchline fodder. Two minutes to collapse the boundary between delusion and documentation; most scouts would've played it safe.
The formal restraint here—dying Dan's testimony filtered through the grammar of unreliable memory—channels a lineage from Welles to Koreeda, though the sci-fi substrate prevents it from cohering into the kind of measured existential statement this approach typically yields.
The decision to keep J-Rod itself unseen, letting paranoia live entirely in Dan's voice and the base's geometry, transforms a potentially gimmicky premise into something claustrophobic and real—the absence becomes the whole film's nervous system.