How much control over your life are you willing to give others in order to live on the internet?
This question has swirled around our inevitable slide toward integrating with technology since before you picked your top 8 on MySpace, gaining more and more relevance as we’ve invited Alexa into our home and given our Google searches the power to show us tailored advertising. It’s a question that is common to us even as we ignore it.
With cinematic polish and a dark sensibility, Nano is hear to ask even louder.
Co-written and directed by Mike Manning, this short film slathers a sci-fi universe on top of film noir. In the near future, your phone is synced with your body via nanobots, and apps can be used to change your eye color in an instant, heighten sexual pleasure, and call for a vehicle to pick you up and take you somewhere (can you imagine?). The integrated experience is controlled by the Aspire Corporation in cahoots with a federal government that now mandates everyone have the tech injected.
As talking heads debate the risks and rewards of letting the police remotely shut down criminals’ bodies during capture, a hacker named Zolee (Brooke Butler) makes contact with a cop (Sebastian Vallentin Stenhøj) to try to thwart the oncoming Nano 2.0 rollout.
It’s tempting to evoke Black Mirror here, but Nano is far more the love child of Minority Report, Mission: Impossible, and a Public Service Announcement from the ACLU. Yes, in this future three things can have a love child together.
The conceit is timely, if not brand new, but the way Manning and company have pulled it off is fun and impressive. There’s a professional sheen on everything, from the camerawork to the well-crafted, clearly detail-obsessed production design that delivers TV screens that almost disappear when you don’t need them and a cell phone that’s as futuristic as it is plausible.
This is fantastic work from an indie crew who obviously poured their hearts into a story about being able to control all sorts of other peoples’ organs. Nano is so sharp, you’ll wonder why a major studio logo doesn’t appear and why it’s not an hour and a half longer.
What do you think?
Image: Beginning Middle End Films
