One of the cruel ironies of the 21st century: as our tools have become more efficient and easy to use, our lives have become more difficult. We are subservient to the ping from work, to the Zoom call, to increasingly automated and impersonal metrics and algorithms. Our individuality becomes less important to our careers than our nonstop presence and submission. You might even say being in the workforce turns us into robots.
But what if the all-encompassing professional takeover of our lives actually turned us into robots? That’s the sci-fi what-if presented by Isabella Ivoš’s terrific short film Robotica. The story starts as a slice-of-life drama about a young white-collar woman suffering from depressing everyday, post-COVID, career-driven life. The film grows gradually more unsettling across its runtime. By the end of the film, it teases body horror and mind control — a full on dehumanization by an omni-present, crushing corporate life.
The film has a layer of black comedy to it: It opens with Jeanne (Claire Banse) completing a quarterly performance review that goes poorly over a video chat. But each subsequent conversation she has, with friends and family, has the tenor of an interview and evaluation, too. Ironically, Jeanne is cold and dry with her mom where she’s falsely cheerful during her performance review at work.
Ivoš’s directorial instincts are excellent, capturing a mood of downbeat entrapment. She brings to the short some cinematic flair, like a shot in a subway station, the zooming subway car highlighting Jeanne’s alienation. (Jeanne’s name is perhaps a reference to Jeanne Dielman, another cinematic woman overly bound to prescriptive social expectations.) Ivoš is aided by strong work from her crew: Michael Rees, an excellent emerging comic director in his own right, edits the the film with unnerving rhythm; a particular stretch near the end when Jeanne seems to recognize her own metamorphosis is remarkably edited. Orlando Wimberly’s color work is very nice, particularly during some neat effects in the last scene. Cinematographer Bart Cortright, who also shot last year’s festival word-of-mouth sleeper The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, does a great job capturing Jeanne’s dark, screen-lit life.
Actors can have a hard time leaving an impression in short films, where they often need to sketch a character in just a couple of scenes. But Banse does an outstanding job in the lead here, with great screen presence and interiority. She projects both vulnerability and an icy disassociation in the wake of her burnout. In the later moments of the film, she injects Jeanne with just a bit of an alien quality to accompany her robotic transformation without losing the earlier thread on the character. I’d love to see Banse in a feature-length role. Robotica is a good audition tape.
In an interview on NoBudge, Ivoš cites French great Jacques Rivette as an inspiration; certainly you can detect Rivette’s fascination with secret conspiracies and controlling forces in Robotica. She also displays some similar storytelling instincts to Jane Schoenbrun, with screens and devices acting as filters and unholy life anchors, though from less of an outsider perspective than Schoenbrun has.
Ivoš mentions in her NoBudge interview that she hopes to turn Robotica into a feature-length film. I hope she succeeds in that goal; I’d love to see where the story goes next, whether it remains a sharp but speculative drama about capitalistic alienation, dives deeper into sci-fi, or shifts into gross-out body transformation horror. No matter what, I’ll be excited to see what Ivoš cooks up.
Robotica (13 min) is streaming for free on NoBudge.
Isabella Ivoš is the writer and director of Robotica. Ivoš is a New Zealand-born filmmaker and advertising art director. Her previous shorts include Rabbit (2023). You can find her web site here.
Additional crew credits on Robotica include Michael Rees as editor, Bart Cortright as cinematographer, Orlando Wimberly as colorist, and Victor Solorzano as sound designer. Claire Banse stars. Additional cast credits include Lily Zhao, Sophia Conger, and Kristin Dimento.
Dan Stalcup is the film critic for The New Cinephile and The Goods. Reach him at dan.stalcup@gmail.com.