Afterburn: An Elegant Sci-Fi About Surviving the Worst

David Cordon’s Afterburn, written by Tatty Hennessy, is a 15-minute sci-fi that is not about improving end of life care at all, unlike what the leads would have you believe. No, this two-hander featuring a researcher and her study participant is about making peace for the long years to come. 

Freya Sumner (Charlotte Pyke) wants to make death better. Working on the nature of near-death experiences, she has the technology to revisit the visions that come to people who did not quite manage to cross over. On the day Agnes (Ayamé Belkin) comes for her appointment, the answers are still murky. 

The two characters are foils of each other. Where one is poised, the other crackles with energy. Yet their niceties are almost so placid you might forget to look for connections while Agnes briefs Freya on her case (a car crash, a dead brother). Or even when their experiment begins its first phase, and Freya and the audience receive key pieces of exposition. The subtlety of the direction moulds the drama with a tension that knows how to beguile and disappear from view.  

The acting elevates the writing. Both women turn in arresting performances, especially in the emotionally fraught, cathartic climax. While the clinic set is designed to be sterile and shot to convey restraint, Agnes’s vision allows the film to stretch its legs into an elegant, dream-like style with its lighting and staging. The editing, weaving together the past, the present, and the unreal onto a plane of longing where they dissolve into hypotheses of the surviving. Belkin’s performance and the imagery shape themselves into a keenly poignant mood. Agnes’s beautiful, happy, blessedly oblivious brother (Sid Cal) is right there, brimming with vitality, available for her to press into memory. A flower fated to an early death. 

Wisely, Afterburn is set in the near future. The technology does not sound too outlandish, and Freya’s limitless-pursuasion-of-optimisation pitch makes the premise feel even more like it is a hop, skip, and a jump away from 2026. And from this vantage point, we may well doubt the soundness of such promises. The emotional payoff, on the other hand, is profound. 

Watch Afterburn Sci-Fi Short Film Trailer