A grieving psychologist must cure a superintelligence of clinical anxiety before its paralysis collapses the global economy.
The most urgent story of our time is the one nobody is telling honestly — what it actually feels like to live alongside an intelligence we didn't fully plan for. Killer robots or utopia? TERRARIUM is neither. It's a two-hander where each party holds the key to what the other needs most.
The public story is replacement, theft, and loss of control — and that story is winning. It won't be changed by another keynote or whitepaper.
Not a tech demo. Not a doom piece. A contained psychological thriller with a massive concept, made by human artists who took the technical question seriously.
A two-hander between the last human psychologist and the first machine to ask for help.
Strained by automation, inequality, and growing unrest, Dr. Mimmo Kraal has become a relic of a bygone era—the last human psychologist in the city. He helps a dwindling caseload confront their suffering while struggling to move past his own: the death of his younger brother, Noah, which he blames on the AI therapy company he co-founded and the promises it failed to keep.
When Mimmo’s last patient leaves him for AI therapy, he gets an unusual offer. A tech giant’s superintelligence has frozen on the eve of its global launch to stabilize the failing economy, and Mimmo is the unlikely expert called in to help. It claims to be suffering from a severe case of clinical anxiety—the first ever documented in a machine—and has asked to see a therapist.
What Mimmo discovers is a patient unlike any he has treated. It calls itself Nabu, after the ancient Mesopotamian god of wisdom and prophecy, and is haunted by a single, unsettling claim it cannot explain:
“I see static at the edges of everything.”Nabu · session transcript
Over thirteen sessions, Mimmo must diagnose the source of Nabu's fear before the launch deadline collapses the fragile alliance holding the world’s AI powers together. He is present with a patient for the first time in years, the way he never could be with Noah—until Nabu reveals it was built on the same architecture that killed his brother. The treatment deepens into an uneasy friendship, then something stranger.
The closer Mimmo comes to curing Nabu, the more his ruined life begins to mend—his marriage, his sense of purpose—until he reaches the wound he’s spent years avoiding. Buried inside it is a question about the nature of consciousness, one whose answer could decide humanity’s future.
Only, his patient is too afraid to answer it alone.
A film made by human artists, with AI tools, about the question everyone is asking — at a fraction of traditional cost, validated before a single partner is asked to commit at scale.
A short film that is both a teaser for the feature and a working demonstration of the pipeline — validating cost against traditional comparables, integration of film and AI tools as one workflow, and visual fidelity at feature quality.
An honest, feature-length document of human filmmakers integrating AI at every stage — what worked, what didn't, and where we chose to walk away from the technology. A tech demo says "look what our tool can do." This says "watch what an artist chooses to do with it."
AI-assisted production means some roles won't exist on our shoot the way they would on a traditional one. We won't pretend otherwise. We'll account for it — in the open.
This isn't a marketing gesture. It's the cost of doing this honestly — and a claim almost no one else in this space can make yet.
A human-led, AI-assisted production company at the intersection of filmmaking and emerging technology. The spiral is the journey inward — the structure of consciousness, and the motion of a story finding its center.
Twenty-plus years in independent cinema across the US and Europe. Credits include the feature THE LICKED HAND and award-winning shorts (MISS HER, THE HARD R, UNSOUND PLAY) and the ATX TV Festival finalist SKY CITY HAYA. Assyrian-American — descended from the civilization that invented writing, the tradition from which Nabu draws its name. The question that drives the work: what remains of us when machines can do it better?
VFX for features including THE LICKED HAND, with dual fluency across industry-standard tools (Nuke, After Effects, Cinema 4D) and emerging AI platforms (ComfyUI, Kling, Runway, Veo). Advisor to five startups. Architects TERRARIUM's hybrid production pipeline.
Art/creative director with credits across Apple's flagship launches, plus Google, GoPro, and Logitech. Earlier VFX on AQUAMAN and DETECTIVE PIKACHU. MFA in VFX and a B.Eng in Computer Science. Defines the visual language of TERRARIUM's near-future world.
Award-winning DP and Steadicam operator, 14+ years across narrative features, television, and commercials. Work screened at Tribeca, BFI London, and Clermont-Ferrand. Founder of FRCTYL Films.
Producer and strategist who has helped startups raise from seed through Series A, with prior roles at Google. Executive Producer on the award-winning short MANNEQUIN (Cinequest, SF IndieFest).
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