Director's statement:
I talk to an AI agent about my life a lot - to get a perspective and some advice, and I find it genuinely useful. But deep down I know that the conversations I actually need to have are the uncomfortable ones, with people, and that a good enough substitute lets me postpone them.
In my eleventh year of school, a classmate took his own life after a girl did not return his feelings. I did not know what to do with it then. It has stayed with me. Garry comes from there: a man who builds something enormous out of a message left on seen, and who has no one to tell.
Researching, I found that AI platforms can escalate what a user tells them when there is a serious safety concern. That mechanism is real. The film extrapolates one step past it: a dystopian organisation that receives the flag and responds by devising a planned intervention - a choreographed day in which strangers and people close to Garry are enlisted to keep him alive. It is a lens for a real anxiety - that being cared for and being handled have started to look the same.
People are taking their most serious material - grief, shame, suicidal ideation - to systems rather than to each other, because systems are frictionless and always there. I am one of them. It is happening at scale, ahead of any understanding of what it costs, and fastest among the youngest.
The film asks what happens to a confession once it leaves you, and whether concern that has been prompted can be told apart from concern that was chosen.
Direction:
A restrained absurdist comedy-drama with elements of horror and thriller. The comedy is what makes the surveillance frightening. Everyone around Garry is entirely sincere; he is the only one who thinks something is happening.
The camera is the dramaturgy. The opening is close and handheld. The moment Garry types his intention into the chat, the visual language changes and never changes back until the very end: long lenses, static frames, shooting through windows and past foreground objects. We never cut to a watcher, never attribute a point of view, but the audience is placed exactly where Garry is, unable to separate surveillance from suspicion. Only the final scene releases it.
Color is naturalistic, cool, indifferent. Sound is soundscape rather than score: city hum, muffled drones, distorted bells marking key beats - a system registering an event rather than an emotion being underlined. Professional cast throughout and shot on location in Amsterdam.
Why me
Twelve years producing commercials, music videos, shorts and features. I know precisely what this script costs and what can be protected when money is short. This is my directorial debut, chosen deliberately: small in scale, rigorous in grammar, difficult interpretively rather than logistically. My production company - Handplayed's - in-house equipment and post facilities mean a modest grant buys considerably more film than usual.
