Google Transcript: A Comedy on Being Known by Our Overlords

Adam Reich’s 11-minute Google Transcript is startlingly funny in a deeply horrifying way. Pick your poison: do you want to be quoted verbatim on every mistaken idea you have ever had? Or, would you like to see an excruciatingly detailed account of every mortification you have ever faced? Perhaps you would like your best friend who enjoys eating your liver to reenact those wounds with an even more humiliating caricature of what you sound like at your most pathetic?

The premise of this two-hander is the promise of yet another life optimising app from the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient giant to whom we are now all corded. It will not only transcribe your existence, but its AI feature will predict with accuracy, to the point that there will be no demarcating prediction from construction, what you will say next. If it were only as simple as if your annoying best friend who knows you too well began to sell that knowledge for profits with the possibility of charging you a premium for their memory.

Adam (Reich) and Alex (Alexander Richard, co-screenwriter) are snowed in at a cabin with no network when their silly dispute over a misquote balloons into a bloated argument. Ostensibly the only way to resolve it is to bring in the supreme arbiter, Alex’s new best friend, Transcript, which gorges on every sonic detail of his life.

It is a neat trick on the film’s part. The drama develops over what is essentially a table read. The longer it goes on, the larger grows the mountain of comedy and horror masquerading as petty argument. Alex reads with gusto, although the range only spans the shades of misery. Adam retreats farther and farther into absurdity from the incomprehensible magnitude of being perceived.

The characters are deliberate caricatures, which does mirror to some sorrowful extent what users are to behemoth tech companies: a collection of scrolling thumbs and skimming eyes held together by weathercock minds. Install, subscribe, allow. And keep allowing. For reasons neither Poe or Wilde had, you will have your portrait painted and the closer it gets to absolute accuracy, the worse becomes the distortion of your being.

Despite the simplicity of the film’s craft, like Adam you will go back for more. The writing—the true attraction—offers the kind of spectacle that overwhelms on first encounter. You return to better comprehend it and, if it resonates hard enough, to tame it. Of course, there is the pure entertainment of two actors seemingly abandoning all restraint.

Watch Google Transcript Short Film Trailer