Best Friend (2018)

Best friends encapsulate how it feels to be truly lonely and the addiction and how desire for anything other than being by yourself feels. It is a short nearly 6-minute film which shows how deeply the people in this dystopian future depend on the chip inside their heads which, with the help of special eye drops, create imaginary friends which they can see and fully interact with. The film starts with Arthur, the main character, celebrating his birthday with these projected, imaginary friends when they start lagging and we discover he needs to ‘recharge’ with eyedrops. Shortly after, Arthur does something which leads to him needing to buy more eyedrops. This puts him in a state of panic and requires him to rely on one of his projected friends to guide him to a vending machine to buy some. This vending machine is very out of the way and is in a seemingly unsafe are. After purchasing these eye drops and being finally relived of the pain, he was feeling without them. Then after an unexpected twist, we are back in Arthur’s house where he is looking in the bathroom mirror, worried that he no longer has the chip in his head, until the camera pans and we see that the chip is now on the other side of his forehead. This is what, to me, makes this film incredible as there is no redemption for Arthur, he loses absolutely everything he has and falls back into the viscous, addictive lifestyle that society has led him too. It is very much reminiscent of the world we live in now and how so many people solely rely on drugs and alcohol to get them through each day. The animation work as well as the voice acting skills creates an incredible portrayal of the range of emotions Arthur faces throught the film and although short it is a film that leaves you deep in thought after watching.