The Artifice Girl

Podcast-on-film is one of my favourite trends of recent years. Dialogue heavy, one room features that tackle layered topics and demand the viewer to sit up and engage with the nuanced topics they're grappling. The Artifice Girl is a great example of this format, with an exceptionally thought-provoking premise, limited characters and minimalistic sets. After a strong opening and follow-up salvo with Act 1 and 2, it stretches a little too far with the finale, falling under the weight of its own wordy dialogue and wobbly performances, but that doesn't completely diminish what The Artifice Girl manages to achieve with so little in the first hour. Really good lo-fi sci-fi stuff. 

A.I. spider on the web A low-budget conversation-driven sci-fi with a high concept. ***The Artifice Girl*** is all about artificial intelligence and the ethical questions behind creating such a thing as A.I. It's basically one big conversation about concent and ultimately what it means to be human. Not only do we learn about all that but also the whole "how the A.I. works" side too which I found very captivating and informative. The structure is very simple, three chapters divided into three distinctive acts. The first two acts were very engaging edge-of-your-seat stuff but the third act was the least interesting to me. Not sure I like the ending. The direction changes between the three acts are bold and they change the formula a lot but I can't say I was fully on board for all of it. The performances were great all-around, superb dialogue, simple but effective set pieces, hard to predict and quite thought provoking. This could have worked as a miniseries also. A promising directionnal debut for Franklin Ritch. Highly recommend if you like *Ex Machina*.