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Aria is a horror film about smart home security

written and directed by Christopher Poole

SYNOPSIS

They are excited to install a new Aria "smart security system" in their home. But while she adapts to life alongside their new domestic overseer, he becomes increasingly paranoid about what may be lurking outside their front door at night.

 
 

FOLLOW THE INSTAGRAM

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CAST

Daniel Lawrence TaylorIMDBTimewastersUncleHunderby

Daniel Lawrence Taylor

IMDB

Timewasters

Uncle

Hunderby

Susannah FieldingIMDBThis Time with Alan PartridgeBlack MirrorCatastrophe

Susannah Fielding

IMDB

This Time with Alan Partridge

Black Mirror

Catastrophe

Natasia DemetriouIMDBWhat We Do in the ShadowsStath Lets FlatsEurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

Natasia Demetriou

IMDB

What We Do in the Shadows

Stath Lets Flats

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

 
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CREW

 
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Christopher Poole

WRITER / Director

Christopher Poole is a comedy director from London. He studied Television Production in Bournemouth and Toronto and has worked in British TV comedy since. His work includes series directing BBC Three and CBBC shows, Hey You! What If, Ladventures and Russell Howard on Sky One.

He has a background in commercials and music videos, having completed comedy projects for brands like PlayStation, Samsung and Huawei.

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Ben Drayton

Producer

Ben is a producer who lives and works in London. He has helped make TV and radio shows for Sky, BBC and Dave, as well as commercials and podcasts for Samsung and Sony. Ben’s work  has included factual, comedy, scripted and non-scripted shows. Aria is the first short film he has produced.

 

HOWARD MILLS

Director of Photography

howardmillsdop.com

Zara Mills

Production Designer

zaramills.com

Jennifer Sheridan

Editor

jenniferdirector.com

David Ball

Costume Designer

IMDB

 

MUSIC

WITH TRACKS from Thom Yorke, Caribou & Dean Hurley

 
 
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Summary

A young couple, Tom and Jenny, are installing a new smart home security system in their tastefully upscale home. The Aria system promises an army of cameras to watch out for intruders, all accessible and controllable via app and voice assistant. But like much other modern smart home technology, Aria has its quirks.

Jenny learns to live alongside Aria, but Tom soon finds himself unnerved by it. The lights go on and off unexpectedly; he gets constant notifications that something's at the door in the middle of the night. Soon strange sounds in the dark take on an ominous portent, and each of Aria's transgressions feels increasingly aggressive, building up to a confrontation between man and machine.

Written and directed by Christopher Poole, this chilling sci-fi horror short's starting point is the installation of a smart home security system in the house shared by a millennial couple. Represented in a cheeky commercial cameo by "What We Do in the Shadows" star Natasia Demetriou, the Aria system promises a comprehensive surveillance system that detects any threat in or out of the home. Instead, it brings on a psychological descent into madness and dread that Tom cannot escape.

The film's considered style and form evoke a disjointed reality constantly interpolated by technology, where the shots alternate between Tom's "real life" with its representation via surveillance footage. The setting of its contemporary home -- both stylish and yet austerely chilly in its modernity -- is reflected in the jagged rhythms of its editing and the almost Cubist-like angles of its visual composition. We never quite settle in the film, with its pacing and rhythms keeping us off-kilter and always on our toes. It all mirrors Tom's unsettled feelings about Aria, which doesn't quite work the way promised.

As the intrusions and mishaps with Aria increase, Tom begins to experience his home as a site of threat and danger. Even the most ordinary sound -- the sound of a blender, the creaking of a floor -- feels like an assault or an insinuation. Actor Daniel Lawrence Taylor captures both Tom's increasing frustration and paranoia, though there are also moments of levity found in the gaffes of Aria that anyone who has screamed in frustration at Alexa or Siri will relate to. But overall, Tom's relationship with the new presence in his home becomes something more ominous and foreboding, eventually escalating into confrontation.

The conclusion of "Aria" does not explain or "make sense," but in its surrealism and horror, it's genuinely startling and oddly wondrous, much in a way that a dream sequence in a David Lynch film would be. With its themes of domestic space run amok with fear and anxiety, the short also possesses shades of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. But "Aria" is truly a contemporary film, resonant with themes about technology, privacy and paranoia and handled with considerable visual panache. Using horror as a way to explore our deepest cultural anxieties, it's no less than an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" for the uber-connected age, where there's no escaping the tether of constant, neverending and "always on" connectivity, even in our most private of spaces.

View on Omeleto

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BEHIND THE SCENES

FEstivals & AWARDS

Aria has been selected to screen at the following festivals

 
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CONTACT

 

Ben Drayton – benjamin.drayton@icloud.com

Instagram – @ariashortfilm