There is a particular kind of dread that only arrives once you have surrendered control to a machine and realized, a beat too late, that there is no one to ask for help. Autonomous — the independent micro-horror produced by and starring Erin Áine and directed by Kyle Valle — builds its entire architecture on that feeling. The title is the thesis: to be autonomous is to operate without outside control, and the film keeps asking who, exactly, is in control once you climb into the back of a car that drives itself.
Told across sixteen short vignettes and shot entirely vertical, Autonomous is engineered for the way people actually watch now — thumb on the glass, screen held close. That is not a gimmick so much as a formal choice that pays off. The frame is narrow, the exits are few, and the phone in your hand becomes the same trap the characters are sitting in.
A relationship on the meter
The setup is deceptively domestic. Amy (Áine) and Derek (Domenic Jungling) are a couple already running on fumes. After a strained dinner with Derek's parents, they summon a driverless rideshare called Gomo to carry them home, and what starts as the low hum of a bad night between two people curdles, mile by mile, into something colder. The performances hold this together. Áine and Jungling trade the kind of clipped, half-finished sentences that real couples use as weapons, and the naturalism keeps the early going grounded long enough that the turn lands.
What elevates Autonomous past a closed-room thriller is how plainly it is about this exact moment. The film presses on our deepening reliance on automation — the quiet fear of being made redundant, of handing the wheel to a system that does not need us — and it locates a sharp irony in its leads: two people who voice their unease about artificial intelligence and then, without a second thought, trust an autonomous machine to deliver them home safely. The horror is not that the technology is alien. It is that it is already in the driveway.
Restraint as a weapon
Valle resists the easy lever. There is little gore here and almost no shock cutting; the menace is atmospheric, accumulated, the product of a believable near-future rather than a monster. The camera frequently makes us feel like eavesdroppers on a private ride we were never meant to share, a voyeuristic charge that suits a culture conditioned to watch strangers through screens. Genre fans tracing the lineage of trapped-in-transit horror will recognize the DNA, but Autonomous earns its tension honestly.
The episodic build is mostly an asset, though it is also the film's one real cost: the strongest stretch is the first act's slow constriction, and the vignette breaks occasionally release pressure the story would be better off keeping. It is a minor complaint about a project that knows precisely what it is doing.
By the time the ride ends, Autonomous has worked as both a tense little thriller and a pointed question about how much faith we should be placing in the systems we are inviting into our lives. It lingers, the way the best small horror does. Autonomous is streaming now on Screamify.
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