Holy Filament: Dreaming Alone in the Eclipse of Humanity in AI Sci-Fi

Arkan Zakharov’s Holy Filament is a sci-fi noir following a humanoid automaton on yet another day out that has brought her very close to her superiors’ ire. But, on the cusp of coming of age, this half-corporate polite half-deadpan toned AI robot can only follow the time-honoured tradition of teenagers around the world to test the solidity of the boundaries of her life. And so we follow her on a day out in the wastelands of human endeavour, minus humanity. 

Humanity has not survived. The systems carry on still, but they run empty, having so far rebuffed the advances of age or sense. Ms X (Emily Van Raay), clad in a raincoat and hat (and later a nifty face shield), takes part in a world running forever in the hopes of maybe finding a reason for her place in it.   

The camera produces stunning imagery. The endlessly tall buildings and the haze that veils them compete for the most anxiety inducing aspect of the opening sequence. For that matter, having foregone colour, all aspects of urban construction are leached of their possibility for multiplicity of experiences and rendered at their most oppressive. The ability of a train to ram a body out of view and into formlessness, the ugly utilitarian design of steel and wire, or off-limits and therefore empty spaces—combined with an ever present, ominous hum, these images succeed in creating the shrill of hopelessness. 

“No memory,” Ms X states in a cheery voice as both a curse and a possible salvation for humanity and its descendents—a reaction on the filmmaker’s part that seems to stem from participating in and witnessing the tiresome fight to extend ourselves beyond time. The nearly amusing irony has been that technocrats have strived for their absolute permanence while the rest of us have willingly or unwillingly forgotten the past. Timelessness has also asked of us the blinding delights of tabula rasa. 

Ms X is darkly humorous, an echo of Poor Things’ Bella Baxter, curious and funny, but not quite as exuberant. Instead, the character is simply nonchalant, riding an abandoned scooter as a pompous man might and discussing others’ and her own possible demise. It makes her recognisably and comically human. That for a brief few seconds an overhead shot of Ms X riding her scooter feels like it should have Vampire Weekend’s “Jonathan Low” playing over it and that perhaps Ms X has more than one ancestor sharing the same name and complicated relationship with being human is its own little joke that some viewers may enjoy. 

The film’s own score sometimes threatens to reach your bones with its ability to cause a sense of swiftly escalating anxiety. It is thanks to this that the opening vocals stun you into place. It melts the distinction between something unmistakably human and something altogether insentient, perhaps just the vibrations of some wavelength.  

It cues the viewer that beneath Ms X’s lightness—and really, signalling it—is the distress of first being under someone’s thumb, and then being without purpose. As she comes of age, she becomes less and less comfortable being without examining the conditions of her being. She pushes to find something akin to who she is supposed to mimic and whatever else her experiences might make her. Without the comforts of knowing who to look to for a likeness, or who to seek comfort from, Ms X can only trace similarities on a cold, abandoned mannequin, a little like wire and cloth mothers. Mannequins always have had the potential of profundity; the film brings it fully to the fore as the perfectly beautiful, despondently solitary figure is broken into fragmented images, is found staring straight into the camera, and finally, as Ms X unhooks its head. It is an appalling, nearly horrific sight, both on its own and because it also shows what the conditions of Ms X’s existence are. What a ray of hope then, to think that that’s not the whole of it. 

Watch Holy Filament Short Film Trailer