Zero
2018 · 14m · Reino Unido
Directed by David T. Lynch, Keith Lynch
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Alice lives with her paranoid survivalist father John on a barricaded farm in the English countryside, until an electromagnetic pulse disables his pacemaker and leaves her alone, guided by his strict rules: trust no one.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Lynch père et fils making a post-apocalyptic coming-of-age about isolation and inherited paranoia sounds like it should be self-indulgent nonsense, but the film actually earns its dread through restraint—the pacemaker death is brutal precisely because it's not dwelt upon, leaving Alice to navigate the wreckage of her father's logic without the safety of his madness.
The formal architecture here—how the film uses barricade imagery and radio silence to literalize the psychological enclosure of a daughter raised in fear—places it in a lineage of British Gothic retellings, though the electromagnetic pulse premise feels like Lynch refracted through contemporary anxiety rather than pastiche.
The entire film pivots on a single sound design choice: the moment the pacemaker fails is marked not by spectacle but by the sudden *absence* of its rhythmic hum, and from that point forward every footstep and breath Alice takes has to carry the weight of autonomy she was never prepared for—that one sonic threshold does everything.