Short Film of the Day: ‘Emit’

March 28, 2020

Written and directed by J.S. Mayank, Emit (2013) takes the idea of aging backwards found in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and applies it to not just one person but to the universe —  to time itself. It is to David Fincher’s film (and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story) what The Others is to The Sixth Sense.

I first saw Emit at the 2013 Orlando Film Festival and immediately fell in love with it. Its concept isn’t new, as countless other sci-fi stories have explored the idea of time running backwards. From one of the earliest stories ever written about time travel, Edward Page Mitchell’s The Clock That Went Backward (1881), to Damon Knight’s This Way to the Regress (1956), which is remarkably similar to Emit, writers have experimented with time. But I can’t recall another short film handling the topic as hauntingly as Emit.