When colleagues Laura and Grady have an impulsive fling on a business trip, they decide it might be for the best if it all just never happened.

Spearing us of any laser guns and an abundance of flying drones, ‘Never Happened’ takes a more sensual and human approach to the sci-fi genre. Colleagues Laura and Grady have an impulsive fling on a business trip, they decide it might be for the best if it all just never happened.

I wrote Never Happened in the middle of the night on a trip to China—I woke up jet-lagged in my hotel room at 4am with the fully-formed idea in my head, then rushed to write it on my iPad in my underwear. I promptly forgot about, until a couple years later when DP Brendan Steacy called and asked me if I had any scripts lying around; he wanted to make a short for nothing, something creatively interesting he could do just for the love of it. We had gone to high school together but never actually worked together, despite being in the same industry, and it all came together beautifully.

While simple in theory, Mark Slutsky’s film focuses on idea rather than exploiting visual productions and effects, but ends up opening a giant door on questions of morality and ethics. Seeds are wonderfully planted in the viewer’s mind as the film slowly unfolds, letting them bloom just as the end credits roll in and well beyond. Little on spectacle but certainly a mind pleaser.