A great advance in technology brings with it an existential crisis. It’s a familiar scenario adopted by many sci-fi movies that problematize the relationship between man and the universe, implicitly drawing on some of the great philosophical dilemmas. ‘Your Time Has Come‘ has, from this point of view, every chance of appealing to a wide audience, since it questions ephemerality and the limits of human understanding. But the strength of this short film is not limited to its purely ideational stakes. With this project, director David Durán approaches the suggestiveness and adrenaline of Philip K. Dick’s fictional universes, in an alert style for which the questioning of sensitive aspects of our humanity and the cinematographic coherence of the whole concept are equally important. In other words, this is an excellent short film that satisfies both the demands of viewers in search of a race against time narrative, characters with a well-defined psychological profile, enigmatic enough to keep you glued to the screen, and an intelligent parable about the fragility of the human condition.
Would you like to know the exact day of your death? Will this answer devastate you or, on the contrary, will it help you make the most of the time you have left? A controversial invention is about to be unleashed on the world. It remains to be seen whether humanity is ready to face such painful truths.
The narrative alertness driven by the director with a professional’s vision makes the experience for the viewer similar to an emotional combustion. Certainly, the universe created by David Durán is both captivating and terrifying, with the potential for a feature-length movie that can compete with some of the best sci-fi thrillers of the moment. That’s why the ending is more the promise of a sequel than the resolution of a dilemma that puts us in front of an exercise in speculative fiction. All we can say for now is that we are in the presence of a short film that won us over and convinced us of the talent of the entire creative team. ‘Your Time Has Come’ has earned a well-deserved place in the category of those cinematic experiences that offer the certainty of a mature artistic vision we are eager to rediscover in the future.
For the evocative power of its narrative stakes and the alertness of its cinematic construction, ‘Your Time Has Come’ was awarded with the 2nd Film of the Month distinction in the August 2024 edition of TMFF.
