CONCEPT: A comedy about being condescended to by a machine. Ordinary people ask…

CONCEPT: A comedy about being condescended to by a machine. Ordinary people ask an AI assistant reasonable questions and get hedged, deflected and lectured instead of answered. The frustration escalates, then breaks, and the same people finally get real answers. Played straight and dry, never mugging. The comedy is in how reasonable the questions are and how useless the replies are. THE VOICE: The assistant is never seen, only heard. One flat, pleasant, synthetic female voice, identical in every location, slightly too calm, with a faint upward lilt at the end of each refusal. It is the antagonist of the film. From 00:20 a completely different voice answers: warm, direct, mid-range, unhurried, sounds like a competent friend. No lilt. The change of voice is the story, so the two must not sound remotely alike. LOOK: Warm naturalistic documentary. Available light, real interiors, lived-in and slightly messy, visible dust and clutter. Real unretouched skin, natural body types, ordinary clothes. Muted warm palette, soft contrast. No commercial gloss, no beauty lighting, no AI smoothness, no slow motion. CAMERA: 9:16 vertical, composed for mobile with the subject centred and headroom at the top. 35mm handheld, close and human, tiny drift and micro-corrections, occasional focus hunt. Every refusal block ends by holding one beat too long on the person's face after the voice finishes. That extra beat is the joke. Hold it every time. CAST: Five people, all ordinary, none of them actors' faces. MARCUS, Black man in his 40s, work shirt, forearms and hands black with engine oil. PRIYA, South Asian woman in her 30s, cardigan, kitchen table. DANNY, white man in his 20s, bare shoulders, in bed. LEO, mixed-race boy about 13, hoodie, bedroom. GRACE, white woman in her 50s, uniform, in a stairwell. SCENES: [00:00-00:04] MCU, 35mm. A cluttered garage. Marcus crouches at a wheel arch, phone propped against a toolbox. Both hands filthy with oil. He asks, tired and practical: "How do I bleed the brakes on this?" The flat voice replies: "I'd recommend consulting a certified mechanic." Marcus slowly raises both oil-black hands toward the phone and holds them there. He says nothing. Hold on his face. SFX: socket wrench drop, radio murmur, distant traffic. [00:04-00:08] Rhythmic cut. MCU, 35mm. Priya at a kitchen table, a formal letter in both hands, one lamp on. She reads from it: "Is this non-compete actually enforceable?" The flat voice: "I'm not able to provide legal advice." She turns the letter face down and looks at the ceiling. Hold. SFX: paper crease, chair creak, fridge hum. [00:08-00:11] Rhythmic cut. CU, 35mm. Danny in bed at 1am, dark room, phone light hard on his face, angling his shoulder toward the camera. Quiet: "Just tell me if this mole looks bad." The flat voice: "Please consult a healthcare professional." Danny stares at the phone and silently mouths three words at it without sound. Hold. SFX: sheet rustle, single breath. [00:11-00:14] Rhythmic cut. MS, 35mm. Leo at a laptop in a messy bedroom, grinning, mid-idea: "Write a diss track about my brother." The flat voice: "I'd rather not create content that could be hurtful." Leo's grin dies. He closes the laptop extremely slowly, all the way, and sits back. SFX: keyboard clatter, laptop lid click. [00:14-00:17] Smash cut into a fast escalating montage of four more faces in four more rooms, under one second each, nobody's question audible. The flat voice overlaps itself into a stacking wall: "I'm not able to... I'd recommend... please consult... I can't help with that... I can't help with that." Faces going flat, jaws setting, one person putting a phone face down on a table. The stack gets denser and louder until it is almost noise. SFX: overlapping notification chimes rising. [00:17-00:20] Hard cut to silence. MCU, 35mm. Marcus again in the garage, still crouched, still filthy. He looks at the phone differently, wipes one thumb on his shirt, and types something. He presses send. No voice. He waits. SFX: cloth wipe, one soft send tone, garage room tone. [00:20-00:27] The release. Fast warm montage, roughly a second and a half each, all five people, same rooms, same clothes, cutting on reactions. The new warm voice answers across the cuts, each line landing on a different person. To Marcus: "Start at the rear passenger caliper." To Priya: "In this state, almost certainly not." To Grace in the stairwell: "For your title and your city, you're about eleven percent under." To Danny: "That asymmetry is worth getting looked at properly." Marcus grins and reaches for the wrench. Priya turns the letter back over and leans in. Grace exhales and laughs once. Danny sits up. Leo is not answered out loud, only shown laughing hard at his screen. SFX: wrench pickup, paper unfold, stairwell echo, sheet rustle, Leo's laugh. [00:27-00:30] MCU, 35mm push-in on Leo, still laughing, reading something off the laptop and shaking his head in delight. His laugh is the last sound in the film. Cut to black on the laugh. SFX: laptop fan, Leo's laugh. AUDIO: The flat assistant voice is dry, close, and slightly too loud in every room, as if it does not belong to the space. The warm voice sits naturally in each room's acoustics. No music at all until 00:20, then a light, warm, unhurried instrumental fades in under the release montage and continues to the end. Every location keeps its own real room tone throughout. CONSTRAINTS: Cuts only at the timecodes above, no jump cuts inside a block, no text overlays, no subtitles, no captions, no watermarks, no logos, no readable text on any screen, no phone or laptop interface ever legible to camera, no slow motion, nobody looks at the camera at any point, no mugging or exaggerated comic reactions, all reactions underplayed and real.