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Currently Playing: QUERY | Omeleto

A man intervenes. A man materializes in a car during sunset in an abandoned cityscape, with a clock counting down. He drives off quickly and finds an elderly woman named Mary, waiting at a stop. He asks if they can talk. After initially saying no, she reluctantly agrees to ride and talk with him as they drive through the dreamscape. The driver learns that Mary has been suffering from a painful illness. His goal is to stop her from taking the most drastic of steps to end that pain. But as they talk, the driver begins to wonder if his interventions really matter when faced with the complexity of human suffering. Directed and written by Stewart Hendler, this contemplative sci-fi short imagines a sentient entity whose task is to intervene with those whose online activity reveals a wish to permanently end their pain and suffering through the ultimate, most irreversible means. Though it sits in the sci-fi genre, it eschews detailed world-building, outside of a few evocative flourishes in the visuals that create a kind of digital dreamscape where the entity and the human meet. Within this soothing yet portentous dreamscape, the driver and the woman meet for a searching, quietly agonizing conversation that illuminates the more difficult depths of the human condition. This conversation is essentially the heart of the film, and the dialogue is rich, full of both profound ideas and intimate, personal detail. Though the bulk of the film's action takes place in a car, the visuals and editing never feel confined or claustrophobic. They situate us in the eeriness of the landscape, reminding us that this conversation isn't quite of our world and the driver himself may not be, either. The ethereality of the atmosphere replaces the urgency of the driver's task with a searching quality, and the race to reverse Mary's decision becomes, instead, an emotional reckoning and accounting. With a narrative whose compelling power resides in its writing, the performances also carry additional weight, and actors Anthony Hill and Holly Kaplan both shoulder that responsibility beautifully. Hill plays the driver as someone who knows what he should say but increasingly is at odds when faced with the complexity of Mary's story, realizing that the tidy script he follows can't account for the depths of her pain. Kaplan offers a deep, rich characterization of a woman who has lived a full life and is suffering a pain that feels dehumanizing. Though the driver offers argument after argument, she has made her choice -- one that will linger with the driver long after their encounter. Reflective and beautifully crafted, QUERY is inspired the writer-director's own life experiences, discovering his mother's browser history after her own passing and wondering if technology could have intervened. A.I. chatbots are being tested in mental health crisis intervention now, but the film makes the leap of imagining the agent-driver as a sentient being that grows and learns with each encounter. It also imagines, perhaps, its limitations, leaving us with questions about the mysteries of human pain and the limits of endurance, which also stay with the driver. But what remains most indelibly is the film's tenderness and empathy: for people whose suffering is so vast, and for the loved ones they leave behind with terribly gnawing questions. QUERY. Courtesy of Stewart Hendler at https://stewarthendler.com.