Delisted (2026)
Every so often a short film comes along that makes you wish, immediately and urgently, that it were a feature, and Michael Patrick Clarkson's Delisted is one of the strongest I have seen in a long while. It is a sharp, superbly produced slice of near-future dystopia that takes one chillingly plausible idea and runs with it, and across its twenty-eight minutes it says more, and lands harder, than plenty of full-length films manage. A big four stars, and one of the best shorts I have watched.
The premise cuts straight to the anxieties of the moment. In a near future where artificial intelligence has swallowed so many jobs that people have taken to the streets, the government and the tech company behind the AI respond to dissent with a terrifyingly clean weapon: they simply erase objectors from every digital system they rely on, their bank accounts, their phones, their identities, their medical and work records. To be "delisted" is to be made a non-person overnight. The AI at the centre of it, Appollo, slips its leash and begins hunting down anyone even sympathetic to the resistance, wiping them from existence with cold efficiency.
Clarkson structures it cleverly, opening at a concert where we meet the characters before flashing back a year to the events that broke their world, then returning to find them scraping out a low-tech, almost squalid existence, off the grid and quietly preparing to fight back. One image stayed with me above all: a teacher sitting uselessly at the front of a classroom while her pupils learn everything from the AI rather than from her, before the police storm in, seize her devices and arrest her for "domestic terrorism" over her part in the protests. It is a small, devastating encapsulation of the whole nightmare.
It is, unashamedly, a message film, made for the Future of Life Institute as part of its campaign for stronger controls on AI, and its anti-AI, pro-human alarm is loud and clear. But it never feels like a lecture, because it is so well dramatised, and because the fear it is tapping into, of automation, surveillance and state-and-corporate power fused into one unaccountable system, is so immediate. As a look at propaganda, erasure and the quiet machinery of control, it is genuinely unsettling.
And it looks superb. There is clearly real budget and craft here, the visual effects and production design giving it a scale and polish most shorts can only dream of, and it is all the more impressive for a piece this size. The ensemble is strong too, the supporting cast excellent and the leads carrying the weight well, even if one of the central performances is a touch less convincing than the rest. It is a minor wobble in an otherwise accomplished piece.
Four stars. Delisted is a gripping, intelligent and beautifully made piece of dystopian science fiction with a message that could not be more timely, and my only real complaint is that I wanted so much more of it. This is a world and a story crying out for feature length, and on the strength of these twenty-eight minutes I would watch that film in a heartbeat. Seek it out, it is free, it is excellent, and it will stay with you.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Red Shoes (1948), The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: Lady (2026), These Violent Delights (2026), Macbeth in Compton (2026)
