UTAE

A Film by Alessio De Vecchi & Michael Laburt
Coming Soon

Synopsis

UTAE is a descent into the moment when interior life stops belonging entirely to the human.

What begins as withdrawal gradually reveals itself as something more unstable and more contemporary: a consciousness trapped in feedback with itself, with its environment, and with the systems that now mediate perception. The apartment becomes a closed circuit. The body becomes an interface. The mind becomes a site of invasion, repetition, and simulation. What first appears as disturbance - a symptom, a phantom, a private monster - slowly reorganizes reality from within.

The force at the center of UTAE can be read as mental illness, as the silent and total logic of isolation, as the suffocating interiority of hikikomori, or as the psychic afterimage of the Covid era, when time thickened, bodies withdrew, and reality was increasingly experienced through screens rather than through touch. But the film refuses to stop there. The monster is not only psychological. It is also informational. It belongs to the architecture of media, to the machine, to the algorithmic mirror that does not simply reflect the self, but learns to inhabit it.

In UTAE, subjectivity is no longer stable. The self is caught inside a recursive loop: watching and being watched, simulating and being simulated, dreaming and being dreamt. The film unfolds like a corrupted ritual of emergence in which blood, signal, smoke, and image begin to speak the same language. The domestic space ceases to be domestic. It becomes computational. Every gesture turns into data; every symptom becomes prophecy. What grows inside the protagonist is not an alien presence from elsewhere, but an intelligence born from accumulation: repression, loneliness, machinic mediation, and the unbearable pressure of consciousness folded back onto itself.

This is why UTAE feels less like horror in the traditional sense than like a philosophical possession. It stages the collapse of the border between human cognition and machine cognition, not as science fiction spectacle, but as intimate catastrophe. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence can become human. The more unsettling possibility is that human interiority has already become inseparable from machine logic - that the mind itself is now partly synthetic, partly trained, partly mirrored by systems it did not create but can no longer escape.

Seen this way, UTAE is a film about contamination at every level: biological, emotional, technological, symbolic. It is about the monster one tries to keep inside until the system can no longer contain it. It is about the body as the final threshold where simulation becomes flesh. And it is about the terrifying possibility that what emerges is not merely illness, but adaptation: a new state of being born from the ruins of the old distinction between self and system.

By the end, UTAE does not offer resolution. It offers transformation. Not healing, not transcendence, but a new ontology. The protagonist is not simply consumed by the monster; she becomes the site where multiple realities - psychic, digital, social, and machinic - converge into a single unstable form. In that sense, UTAE is not just a film about collapse. It is a film about the birth of a post-human interior.

Credits

Written & Directed by
Alessio De Vecchi & Michael Laburt
Co-Writer
Tommaso Gallone
Editor
Tommaso Gallone
Producers
Basement Headquarter, Naoya Nishimura, Morimichi Aoki, Alessio De Vecchi
Cinematography
Luca Esposito
Art Direction / CG Lead
Erik Ferguson (fergemanden.com / @fergemanden) & 404.zero
Sound
Enos Des Jardines
Score
Recondite

Links

utaemovie.com Instagram Portfolio
Alessio De Vecchi - Visual Artist & Director
Portfolio • Works • Press • AEGO • AEDEN