Best Friend (2018)

It's the near future. Society relies on a brain implant that creates artificial friends, but to what lengths would someone go to in order to keep this illusion alive?

‘Best Friend’ begins with a POV shot, we are immediately shown a woman, Cami, accompanying her, a multitude of bright surreal characters. Its Arthur’s birthday, he’s surrounded by his friends. The whole event seems almost too good to be true, Arthur sits there, baggy eyed and grey, but he’s elated, surrounded by friends. Arthur’s reality quickly deteriorates, and he begins a struggle to maintain what brings him comfort.

‘Best Friend’ continues the science fiction trope of a society that must use escapism in order to stay happy but builds upon it by intertwining an allegory for addiction into its narrative. The idea’s routes lie in the literature of the mid-20th century, books such as Phillip K. Dick’s “Do Android’s Dream Of Electric Sheep”, the inspiration for Blade Runner, features a device in people’s homes that allows them to induce emotion at will, or Logan’s Run, in both its film and novel, features a society in which people’s lives are capped at 30, so an enclosed society resorts to a culture of hedonism in order to get by. ‘Best Friend’ introduces the idea of a society addicted to their constructed reality through the usage of a drug like eye drop used to renew the effects of the Best Friend implant. This turns Arthur’s search to renew his constructed reality into a physical one, leading him into conflict. This parallels the real experiences of those suffering from addiction, highlighted especially within America’s ongoing opioid crisis, a humanitarian catastrophe manufactured by private companies’ involvement in prescription medicine. Parallels can be drawn between the desperation seen in the short film, and the real-world poverty and crime people addicted to opioids often fall into

The parallel of real-world addiction due to corporate exploitation, is able to come across effectively by removing from our current context, allowing the messaging to cut through people’s predispositions about the victims of events like the opioid crisis, or other past uses of addiction to control people, such as in British controlled China, where opium was used to force the population into relying on British presence.

Ultimately ‘Best Friend’ is a highly compelling short film, narratively and stylistically. Its captivating narrative keeps itself simple and doesn’t get bogged down with going out of its way for the sake of exposition or pointless explanation. It's up to the audience to apply their own meaning, a subtlety often missing within the modern science fiction genre.