Nowadays never seemed so distant

In a series of three short films, all relating to technology’s impact on our relationships, Max Sherman explores comedy, ego, and the ways in which we struggle to communicate, on and off-line. 

Each segment in Nowadays starts off with someone on their phone. Using Instagram filters, answering a call, on a dating app. In the first, two young women take selfies when they approached by a young man who has been following them for a while. The second, a man meets with his father for lunch but runs into some trouble when his father asks him how Snapchat works. The last has a man mindlessly swiping on Tinder while waiting for his Uber, but makes an embarrassing mistake when he assumes the first empty car on the street is his cab.

Nowadays is a trio of punchy, darkly comedic, and strangely baffling shorts. These people all feel like they could exist in our world, but do they? How horrifically real are these films? One of the things I appreciated about this series was that it didn’t punch down at the usual targets of technofear, and instead provided a scathing commentary on communication and respect. Director Max Sherman has created a pertinent satire on modern life, using only the modernity around us.