Spend Five Minutes Exploring The Seedy Robotic Underbelly Of Bangkok

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

How’s your day going so far? Really? Good to hear. You want to make it even better, check out this short film, True Skin. It’s about renegade cyborgs roaming the seedy underbelly of a futuristic Bangkok where body modification has been elevated to an entirely new level. If that’s not enough to pique your interest, the entire run time hovers around five minutes. What do you have to lose?

This is a dazzling look at a bleak future where humans buy technological body enhancements like you would buy a new pair of shoes. Pure humans, or “naturals,” are relegated to the lowest caste of society, left to beg and die on the street. From director Stephen Zlotescu, True Skin is a mad neon riff on classic sci-fi films in the vein of Blade Runner.

The look of this is phenomenal. From the near-hallucinatory cityscape and partially augmented humans, to the technological black markets and fully synthetic prostitutes, the visual design is stunning.

More than anything, this short feels like a trailer rather than a standalone story, or at least a pitch video for a longer project. There is too much story, too much world-building detail, to be explored in five minutes. With the protagonist’s constant narration, the end result comes across like someone summarizing a movie for a friend.

Luckily for us, if you check out the N1ON website, you learn that this is indeed just a teaser for things to come. The filmmakers have a much larger project in the works, and this is little more than a sliver. Given what they accomplished in just a few minutes, they could pull off something fantastic given an entire movie to work with.

Check out some stills from the movie.