Our pals at Show Me Shorts have an eye for curating the best short films our mortal realm has to offer. Every month, they dish out a taster called The Screening Room that points to three quality shorts with something in common. The team recently highlighted short films that led to feature films, including Alive in Joburg (which became the Oscar-nominated District 9), Peluca (which became the cult hit Napoleon Dynamite), and Ebony Society (which will become Tammy Davis’s feature follow-up to his debut Born to Dance).
It got me hankering to check out recent short films that have scored feature deals. That’s where I came across this creepy, chilling, poop-yourself-just-a-little-bit sci-fi horror.
Abe is (largely) a one-room, real-time tale – perfectly suited to an 8-minute running time – that vacuum-packs all our technophobic fears of artificial consciousness into this robotic character who just wants to comprehend love. The script’s main monologue can feel a bit schlocky in parts, but there’s no denying the unsettling power this short holds – and how goddamn freaky that final image is.
MGM immediately acquired the rights to turn this into a feature. If you’ve got a flashy VR headset, you can also download the short for VIVE and Oculus.
ABE from Rob McLellan on Vimeo.
