Director's statement:
The seed of Reset came from my own unease with how modern society measures worth. We live under constant, invisible timers: get the right job, find the right partner, hit the milestones, keep up with everyone else. If you fall behind, you’re made to feel like you’ve failed at life. I wanted to take that pressure — which is already suffocating — and make it literal, undeniable, and horrifying.
In the world of Reset, citizens are forced to “qualify” by age thirty. Those who don’t are reset to infancy, stripped of their identities, their memories, their humanity. On the surface, it’s absurd. But that absurdity hides a darker question: what does it mean to have your entire existence reduced to a deadline?
The tone of Reset moves between satirical humor and creeping dread. That duality is essential. Horror is most powerful, I believe, when it’s funny first — when laughter gives way to unease, and the audience suddenly realizes the joke is on them. I draw inspiration from filmmakers like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, who weaponize satire and body horror to expose the grotesque underneath the everyday. In Reset, a government policy becomes a monster — faceless, bureaucratic, and inevitable.
The character of Jeff is our everyman. He’s competent, likable, someone who has played by the rules his whole life, only to find himself staring down an impossible deadline. His unraveling is meant to mirror the way many of us feel in our twenties: the fear of being “too late,” the panic that our best chances are already behind us. Watching Jeff resist the system — and fail to resist it — becomes a distorted reflection of the pressures we all internalize.
Visually, I want the film to feel like a fever dream. Hard cuts, intrusive flash imagery, and moments of hallucinatory clarity. Think Danny Boyle in Trainspotting or Sunshine, where style and psychology collide in sharp, unnerving bursts. The “reset” transformations will lean into body horror — clumps of hair, raw skin, images of regression — but fractured, glimpsed in flashes. The horror here is not just the violence of rebirth, but the erasure of self.
At its core, though, Reset is about choice — or the lack of it. The film asks: what happens when your only options are assimilation or annihilation? Is starting over truly a second chance, or just another form of control?
By pushing this concept to its extremes, Reset becomes both a satire of our cultural obsession with achievement and a horror story about losing who we are. It’s a nightmare disguised as a bureaucratic process, a comedy that curdles into tragedy.
I want audiences to leave unsettled — laughing nervously at first, then staring into the dark with the same dread as Jeff, asking themselves if they’re already running out of time.
