Hollywood and the indie scene have wholeheartedly embraced artificial intelligence (Terminator, Black Mirror) as a core storytelling element over the years. Sometimes it’s concrete machinery; other times it’s an abstract form of cold computation—a constantly evolving menace terrorizing mankind in all aspects of life. The latest off that assembly line is writer/director Cellina Munro’s Stream of Consciousness, a short that weaponizes a very specific element of an AI assistant device.
Ayana (Cellina Munro) is preparing for a date, fixing her makeup while FaceTiming her boyfriend, Demetrius (Jeremy Mitchell). That meetup, however, is placed in jeopardy when Ayana’s AI home assistant (nicknamed Veda, voiced by Angelica Ubiera) alerts the young woman to increasingly poor weather conditions. As you probably may have guessed, not all things are as they seem, and Veda becomes the obvious culprit in Ayana’s evening going awry.
As with all films in its genre, Stream of Consciousness pits the human mind against that of a supercomputer. It’s sci-fi at its most primal, and in that department, Munro’s short succeeds. It’s simple opening with Demetrius considering calling off the date, and Veda overwhelming Ayana with endless reports of nearby thunderstorms. The odd camera placement and awkward closeups benefit Munro’s storytelling, creating an atmosphere of unpredictability. That’s all well and good for the narrative’s inaugural stanza, but cracks begin to show in the film’s ability to realize its concept very early on, and these imperfections only deepen with time. Audio is an issue that presents itself almost immediately: poorly mixed rain ambiance makes it sound like Ayana’s house is being flooded, as opposed to water drops pattering off her windows and walls.
The core problem with Stream of Consciousness is that it largely fails to understand or subvert its sci-fi trappings.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in its sinister central machine. Veda is an awfully underwhelming centerpiece, amounting to little more than see-through plastic covering a speaker, with a tiny RGB light encased inside. The bot spews generic robot gibberish, accompanied by disjointed cuts of Ayana trying to make sense of its rambling. It’s confusing to say the least, compounded further by uneven sound design and a weird overlay of an old film stock looping over the actual footage. Stylistically, it makes no sense and isn’t elaborated on either. Why is Veda doing what she is doing? Has such an incident happened before? Is Ayana a prisoner of her home, held there by a piece of plastic? Too much is left to speculation.
Stream of Consciousness has decent sci-fi fundamentals and certainly has the courage to lean into more experimental territory—even superficially touching on existentialism at one point. Only to stop probing just when it might have been inches away from happening upon something truly compelling.
