Rahul Jana
Creator ID26-11-00-0075
Score breakdown
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Film Review
Written by Kineograph
A couple in a hotel bed configures their unborn baby on a laptop — the slim nose, alas, is only free with the deluxe pack — and the film follows the boy through an entire life in which AI keeps helpfully, catastrophically, optimising everything it touches.
This review discusses the ending. If you would rather watch the film first, we recommend you do, and then come back.
Some Features Cost Extra
It starts as a shopping trip. A couple, propped up in a hotel bed with the laptop glowing between them and the city lights outside, is designing their baby: “A nice sleep nose? Nah. Slim nose is free only with the deluxe pack. We didn’t buy that… Apply later.” The baby arrives with, inevitably, a magnificent nose — “That’s a nice big nose. I told you we needed that… Oh, look at him. Perfect.” And the mother, we are told, has been the way she is “since her birth prompt.” In this world, people are not born. They are configured — on a budget.
Best Scene (1:30–1:50)
“Five, man. Five.”
The boy goes to school, and the teacher asks the class: “How many fingers do we have on each hand?” — “Six! Very good.” And then another child corrects the record, and the correction is the kindest line in the film: “Five, man. Five. Don’t worry. It’s okay. You’re just different. But you’re still our friend.”
Every AI filmmaker alive knows the six-fingered hand — it is the technology’s most famous mistake. This film takes that mistake and makes it the thesis: the glitch is the child, the error is the person, and the person is loved anyway. It is the one moment where the satire stops joking and simply tells the truth, and it is the scene the whole film is remembered by. The same boy, moments later, confesses, “I can’t read” — an optimisation, presumably, that nobody purchased.
Five Recommendations for Grief
Life lurches onward in the film’s breathless, point-of-view sprint: an endless saga in a shop about a blue ball pen (“Inside, it should have gall-pain written on it”); a motorcycle ride down a street of shuttered shops that ends with him pinned under the bike. And then the film’s coldest, funniest set piece. Under a tree, an orange-robed guru consoles a grieving widow — “My husband passed away two years ago. I feel really lonely and sad” — with a tablet of dating profiles: “Loss. Loneliness. Sadness. That sounds really difficult. And your feelings are completely valid. Wait. Here are five dating app recommendations.”
When that fails, the system pivots, seamlessly, to wellness: “Would you like me to suggest five ways to process grief instead?… Studies show baking helps with grief. Here are five amazing recipes… Banana bread’s my favorite.” It is a perfect miniature of empathy as a user interface — every feeling acknowledged, none of them met. Then, without pausing, the film marries him off: a wedding seen from his own eyes, his hands holding the flower garland up to his bride, Shreeya, in her red sari.
“Who Are You?”
By now the seams are the story. The people in this life keep changing — the mother, Shreeya, and the man himself shift faces, hair and build from scene to scene, as if each stage of his life were rendered by a slightly different machine. Some of that is this film’s honest weakness, and the slop score reflects it. But the film also speaks, deliberately, in corrupted language: a sudden line of Turkish, “Cotton clouds on the ground,” a voice announcing “Perfect lip sync, bro” over an empty hospital corridor. Late in the film he turns on his own life and demands, “What do you think you’re doing? Is it Shreeya? Who are you? I’m not that bad. I’m not that bad. Who are you?” The satire and the slop have become the same thing — a man generated so many times he no longer recognises the render.
The Deluxe Pack
It ends, as it began, in a hospital economy. Shreeya is in a bed, a doctor stands by with a clipboard, and her husband pleads: “Doctor, please. Will she make it?” And the film closes the loop it opened in its first thirty seconds, with the coldest callback in the festival: “You didn’t select the Deluxe pack? Where are his ears?” Their baby, it turns out, was born without ears — a feature his parents did not pay for. The film never gives us a clear look at the child, and it does not need to: the line is the picture. A whole life of upgrades, and the one checkbox nobody ticked was his son’s.
Final Thoughts
HUMANITY.exe is a checkout page disguised as a life — a dark, funny, genuinely unsettling satire about what happens when being human becomes a list of paid options.
I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys their comedy with teeth, and to every viewer who has ever read a chatbot’s condolences and felt the chill of being processed. It is rough around the edges — the faces wander and some of the garble is just garble — but its best ideas are better than polish: a six-fingered boy told he is still their friend, and a father asked, at the end of everything, where his son’s ears are.
Scene Breakdown
0:00–0:30 — Configuring the baby on a laptop: “Slim nose is free only with the deluxe pack. We didn’t buy that.”
0:30–1:00 — The birth: “That’s a nice big nose. I told you we needed that… Perfect.”
1:00–1:30 — “Sorry, baby. Mommy’s been like this since her birth prompt. Okay, class.”
1:30–2:00 — Best Scene: the classroom. “Six! Very good.” — “Five, man. Five… You’re just different. But you’re still our friend.”
2:00–3:00 — The saga of the blue ball pen: “It should have gall-pain written on it.”
~3:05 — The motorcycle crash: he lies pinned under the fallen bike.
3:30–4:30 — The guru and the grieving widow: “Your feelings are completely valid. Wait. Here are five dating app recommendations.”
4:30–5:00 — The pivot to wellness: “Studies show baking helps with grief… Banana bread’s my favorite.” Then the wedding.
5:00–5:30 — The identity crisis: “Who are you? I’m not that bad. Who are you?”
6:05–6:18 — The hospital: “You didn’t select the Deluxe pack? Where are his ears?”
1:30–2:00 — The classroom count lands on six fingers per hand. The film knows it — it is the joke and the theme — but it begins life as a generation artifact, so it is listed here honestly.
Throughout — Faces, hair and bodies change noticeably from one life stage to the next.
Throughout — Dialogue and on-screen text garble constantly — “REST IN BEES FUSHING!”, “gall-pain”, a line of Turkish out of nowhere, “Perfect lip sync, bro.” Most of it doubles as the film’s deliberate AI-nonsense satire voice; it is the seams showing either way.
Created for the Higgsfield Global Film Festival.
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