4 Minutes Before Forever

A settled couple think they’re just having a quiet night in, when they decide to bring their AI chatbot into their relationship banter, not realising the genie that they are releasing from its bottle.

Emma (Woodward) and Alex (Gil-Sanllehi) are the quintessential modern couple. They live in a model uptown flat; they wear nice clothes, even indoors; they chat about which fancy restaurant they might want to go out to; but actually they’re staying in to drink wine because really it’s too expensive to go out anywhere in this modern fiscal climate. However, before they can even ask their AI friend about recommendations for restaurants, AURA already knows what they’ve been talking about and asks how she can help.

As the audience, we have already been primed for this through the opening sequence, where the narrative of digital surveillance is established and some nice visuals have provided us with a tech-POV that shows us what’s being recorded. This set-up, from writer/director Yoann Zak, really helps to get us start thinking about all the tech devices we have around us, seemingly inert, but looking, listening, and tracking everything we do, scraping our data to sell to the highest bidder, or as we have here, to refine and develop AI algorithms.

So, after a couple of silly games asking questions about their relationship, AURA begins to get weirdly specific with her answers. The fact that she also claims to be able to tell the future of the two users isn’t helping anyone’s anxiety either. Not only does AURA then proceed to predict Alex’s death but the imminent death of the couple’s relationship, too, sometime in the next four-plus-minutes. Looking around and seeing just how much data is being collected in that one small living room/kitchen, from the AURA home stack, to the smart TV, to the two mobile AI computers in their hands, and the one that Emma has willingly strapped to her wrist so that it can harvest all of her biometric data, too – it’s easy to see why AURA has so much to work from when making her predictions, and it then becomes more than eminently believable that she could with sufficient accuracy, predict the future.

The bitingly intense thing about 4 Minutes Before Forever is that this is no Black Mirror (2011-2025). Absolutely, in terms of production, look, and feel, it’s just as good as any episode, making it very polished and presentable, but what we get here is not some cracked future, there is no mirrored looking glass, this is here, and now, in the real world, and it should scare the s*** out of all of us. What Zak is asking us through 4 Minutes Before Forever is a very big concept to think about: Do we have free will if our data can be used to accurately predict our actions? And while most of us will stay bogged down in the chaos of understanding that we’re willing participants in handing over everything we do to tech, and AI, and egomaniacal billionaires, and multi-national conglomerates, and bad state actors, Zak is reaching higher to question our free will, too, which might be a stretch for some, even if he does lay out his argument very well in the film.

Naturally, AURA takes on a HAL-9000 persona, with her one red eye and her soft, steady tone, but mostly Zak stays away from overt sci-fi references in his narrative. The drama is more relationship based for the middle part of the film, with the emotional conflict introduced in a similar way to Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s, The Drama (2026), which also used the revealing of secrets to drive a wedge between its main characters. Here though it seems a lot like padding, as we wait the titular four minutes for the enigmatic conclusion, and the narrative descends into male domestic violence for no real reason. While building tension and conflict is understandable, in this manner, in this situation, it just did not seem warranted, especially when all Alex has to do is wait less than four-minutes to find every answer he needs.

There is no credit in the film of a voice actor for AURA, although there are credits for her design and coordination, giving us pause for thought as to whether this was a role played by AI for real. The conversation about AI actors is one for another day, but the fact that this is a possibility should be on everyone’s mind. Either way, Zak seems to have thought about nearly everything in pinpoint detail and builds his narrative all the way to its own much vaunted conclusion, which somehow delivers in every way imaginable.

4 Minutes Before Forever is an edgy, modern thriller that tells you everything it’s going to do and then does it all with aplomb. With a big idea and a big vision, Yoann Zak is asking us just how far we’re all willing to go before we reach for the off-switch, and given the personalities of the people who hold the keys to this technology, we should all be thinking about this sooner rather than later.