This past week, director Jeff Osborne’s sci-fi short film Anesthesia was released on YouTube, courtesy of the Dust channel. The story sees a businessman encountering his mother via an anesthesia app while undergoing a procedure, but all is not as if first appears.

Synopsis –

Michael is enjoying a nice day at the beach with his parents, but his mother has a strange, and rather invasive question to ask.

A young boy is sitting on the beach with his mother, who promises to take him for pizza on the way home. What at first seems like a wistful childhood memory, however, quickly becomes more sinister when the young boy’s mother asks him for his passwords. Michael, suddenly at his adult age, questions how he can possibly be talking to her, and why she even wants the information. She calms him momentarily, but he is then struck by the surreal nature of the encounter, and naturally continues to question what’s going on.

Anesthesia plays as almost a variation on Inception, by way of Black Mirror. Or more like a reverse Inception, I guess. Michael is undergoing a heart operation, and whilst asleep under Anesthesia, somehow he is able to be aware (is it a lucid dream, or something more sophisticated?) of what is going on via the use of an anesthesia app. This allows him to interact, to a limited degree, with the real world by way of a tablet device he is given whilst in the dream state, by his childhood mother.

The movie offers an intriguing scenario, and a rather frightening one. If people are able to communicate with us whilst we are unconscious, to interact with us when we think we’re in a dream, we can be caught off-guard. Using childhood memories, our relationships with people we love, to try to draw out valuable information from us, is like violating our very souls. As technology develops, and information gathering becomes more sophisticated, more personal, we are at a very real risk of being lulled into a false sense of security, into a state where we can easily let secrets slip. Michael is in a very vulnerable state, not knowing what the outcome of the operation will be, and the introduction of a ticking clock threatens to force him into action without thinking through the ramifications.

Anesthesia is written by John Harden, and directed by Jeff Osborne. It stars Aaron Staton, Marianne June Noscheze, and Arthur Waite, amongst others. You can watch Anesthesia on YouTube, for free, below. It is well made, with twists and turns, anf is very much worth checking out.

Dust is a curated Youtube channel of independent short films, all in the science fiction genre, and they have a wide selection of well produced, thought provoking sci-fi films, all available to watch for free. We highly recommend checking them out.

https://www.youtube.com/@watchdust/featured

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