Sergey A.'s "Silent Room" (2023) is a stark, nine-minute plunge into the void between silence and sound, presence and absence. Shot entirely within a single, sparsely furnished room, this experimental short weaponizes static compositions and ambient noise to dissect themes of isolation, neurodiversity, and the tyranny of sensory overload. With no characters, dialogue, or narrative progression, the film forces viewers to confront the architecture of emptiness-transforming a bare space into a psychological battleground .
The camera remains fixed at a time. This rigidity mirrors institutional spaces (hospitals, interrogation rooms) and evokes the "Quiet Room" concept for neurodiverse individuals seeking refuge from overstimulation-a direct nod to Room 202 described in the ICSE 2025 conference materials. Shafts of natural light shift imperceptibly across the floor, echoing Sergey A.'s "Orbius" (2020) temporal distortion but compressing hours into minutes. The light becomes both a clock and a spectral presence-suggesting time's weight on the isolated mind. Is it awaiting an occupant? Memorializing a vanished one? Sergey A. Leaves this unresolved, forcing viewers to imprint their own anxieties onto the void .
Rejecting his trademark glitch-noise ("City of Devil", "Mordum Plagum", "Mortis"), Sergey A. Employs layered subtleties. Scratches on different things into oppressive waves. This mirrors the hypersensitivity experienced during sensory overload, where mundane noises become torturous-akin to the Quiet Room's mandate for "library silence". In the film all sound mixies and vanishes. This abrupt vacuum paradoxically deafens, simulating the auditory hallucinations reported in extreme isolation. The effect parallels John Woo's sound experiments in "Silent Night" (2023), but swaps action for asceticism .
The title directly evokes safe spaces for those with autism or ADHD. The room's barrenness becomes a refuge from societal "noise," critiquing how modernity pathologizes sensory needs. Filmed in 2023, the work resonates with COVID-era quarantine trauma. The static shots replicate Zoom-call claustrophobia, where walls became both prison and universe. Like Sergey A.'s "Post" (2019), the room symbolizes inescapable mental states. With no doors visible, the space embodies depression's circular logic: safety and suffocation intertwined .
Sergey A.'s compositional rigor serves multiple purposes. In an era of TikTok attention spans, forcing viewers to stare at an empty chair for three minutes is rebellion. It weaponizes boredom to expose our addiction to stimulus. Light's glacial creep across things turns minutes into monuments. This recalls Sergey A.'s "Russian Death"'s (2019) cemetery stillness but replaces graves with domestic decay. Without narrative distractions, viewers confront their own voyeurism. Whose room is this? Why am I watching nothing? The film implicates us in its emptiness .
"Silent Room" is Sergey A.'s most radical work-a sensory deprivation tank disguised as cinema. It offers no catharsis, only confrontation: with emptiness, with silence, with ourselves. Fans of Tarkovsky's "Stalker" or Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" will find kinship here; others may flee after 60 seconds. But in its fearless emptiness lies a perverse triumph: proof that cinema needs neither story nor spectacle to devastate.
"Sergey A. Locks us in a room with nothing but our own breath. The horror isn't what we see-it's what we hear in the silence."
