Kay (Taj Atwal) may be an android, but her moral compass proves stronger than the increasingly unstable artist (Paul Ready) who claims she’s his muse — even though his eerie paintings hint at something far darker lurking behind his methods. That’s the set-up for Muse, a new sci-fi short by Azhur Saleem.
Saleem sent Gizmodo his short, which was recently posted on sci-fi YouTube channel Dust, and noted that it deals with “themes of technology and creativity and how we as humans fit into the middle of that.” Watch it here!
Among the Muse cast, Atwal (who recently appeared on Amazon’s Simon Pegg-Nick Frost supernatural comedy Truth Seekers) is particularly notable as Kay. Her subtle performance, enhanced by faint but effective sound effects, shows her transformation from dutiful servant to someone who’s not entirely self-aware, but is still able to realise that — between all those visitors who keep vanishing and those weird gaps in her memory — her owner is up to some very bad business.