A woman confronts A.I.


Bo is a mother and programmer whose work has built one of the world's largest A.I. services, Molly. But as her technology takes the world's jobs and creates global economic instability, she begins having nightmares that her own son, Lucas, is being consumed by a demon-like figure, Moloch, and she's powerless to stop it from happening.

When the company she works for decides to release the latest version of her A.I. system before it's been fully tested, Bo's own family is affected. As the competition in business and jobs ramp up and the pressure proves unsustainable for Bo's husband, Bo must decide whether she can resist or comply with its legitimization to help herself and her family.

Directed and written by Tom Cozens, this sleek short sci-fi drama combines the polished intricacy of a high-level corporate thriller with a thought-provoking evocation of dystopian technology gone amok, as one woman navigates the moral complication of her A.I. creation. While many film narratives have explored how pushing the borders of human knowledge can often prove perilous, the difference here is how quickly and widely the effects proliferate, enabled by an all-consuming system that sacrifices human dignity to the pursuit of so-called progress -- leaving ordinary people little recourse to fight back against it.

The film opens with a visceral and harrowing dream sequence of Bo's son being fed to a large furnace presided over by the demon Moloch, a god who demanded sacrifice for power. It's a bold opening, more akin to a horror film and evoking a fear and dread that lingers over the film, set in a much more recognizable modernity. The present day is portrayed in a muted yet coolly gleaming light and color palette that situates it neatly in modernity, as Bo contends with Molly's negative effects on the world, and within her own family, as her husband Martin finds his work affected by A.I., souring their home life. The layered storytelling takes time to build up and then weave together the socioeconomic with the personal strands of the narrative, but as they come together, they gain in weight and emotional resonance, as the effects of Bo's work in A.I. seep into her own home and family in difficult ways.

As Bo, actor Fiona Hampton deftly juggles the concerns of a parent and a creator, as well as the arc of someone whose feelings and realizations about her life's work shift as she watches it play out in the arena of lived experience. That lived experience -- for her, and for the world at large -- is irrevocably changed by A.I., at a pace that far exceeds past technological evolutions. She and the company she works for cannot keep up and find themselves casualties, putting themselves in a weakened position as they attempt to stake some kind of claim in the world.

With its vivid storytelling and intelligence, MOLOCH deftly encapsulates the growing anxiety around A.I., slowly making its way into the daily routines of ordinary people, often via the companies that want to leverage it to streamline operations and boost profits. The A.I. itself is portrayed not as innately nefarious, but in its focus on the creators and companies that use it, the narrative levels its critique at a system with no guardrails or even stop-points for evaluation. In its unquestioned imperatives of growth, expansion and profit, it creates its own ill effects and pays for them dearly, provoking questions of what technology serves and why.


MOLOCH. Courtesy of Tom Cozens at https://moloch.film.