Max Distance will be part of the HollyShorts Film Festival, which is scheduled for August 10, 2025.
at the TCL Chinese Theatre’s Egyptian Theatre
By Valerie Milano
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 8/9/25 – Isolation breeds obsession in Max Distance, a razor-sharp, darkly funny short from Marissa Goldman that captures the suffocating quiet of modern loneliness and then twists it into something much darker.
At the center is Erica, a remote programmer confined to her studio apartment, her days consumed by awkward Zoom calls with her overly familiar boss and her nights by the quiet, magnetic presence of her neighbor, Nat. What begins as innocent observation from her window slowly curdles into something more voyeuristic and ultimately, sinister.
Goldman smartly mines the residue of pandemic-era claustrophobia to create a world that feels at once familiar and slightly off-kilter. “Even if you have a strong community online, there’s something isolating about being in your own little bubble,” she says, reflecting on her own remote-work experience. That sense of bubble-wrapped disconnection permeates every frame of the film. The apartment setting, with its boxed-in visuals and flickering screens, becomes a kind of psychological trap. The film isn’t just about watching it’s about what happens when you only watch. When the screen becomes your only point of contact with reality, how long before that reality begins to blur?
Click below for our exclusive interview:
Erica is played with unsettling nuance, a perfect blend of socially awkward, sweet, and potentially dangerous. “I want audiences to empathize with her, even though she does bad things,” Goldman says. “She represents the worst instincts we all sometimes feel—stalking a handsome coworker on LinkedIn, scrolling for hours—then not stopping when we should.” Erica isn’t a villain in the traditional sense, but Goldman refuses to let us off the hook by asking us to sympathize too easily. Her descent is slow, almost funny at times, but by the time she makes a move to manipulate Nat’s life from afar, the tension snaps into place.
One of the film’s most memorable elements is the absurd-yet-familiar Zoom dynamic between Erica and her boss Devon. “So much of Devon’s dialogue comes from overheard Slack messages and Zoom exchanges I’d scribble down,” Goldman shares. Lines like “Let’s circle back” and “I’m curious to ideate” provide comic relief but also heighten the sense that Erica’s real life is disintegrating into digital noise. The humor is subtle, often dry, and lands without ever breaking the film’s mood.
Visually, Max Distance is as tight and boxed-in as its protagonist. The framing is deliberate, the light artificial, and the world beyond the window always just out of reach. This kind of confined storytelling can feel static in the wrong hands, but Goldman uses it to her advantage, letting the tension simmer rather than explode. As she noted, she was inspired by sound-driven thrillers like The Conversation and Blow Out: “Those voyeuristic, sound-driven thrillers deeply inspired me.”
Though the character of Erica wasn’t written with a particular actor in mind, Goldman recalls: “Someone suggested Anna Seregina… she brought exactly the right blend of vulnerability and edge.” The casting choice grounds the film in emotional truth even as its narrative edges toward the surreal.
Ultimately, Max Distance is a story about what happens when connection becomes distorted by isolation, and how screens, meant to connect us, can sometimes become barriers instead.
Verdict:
Max Distance is a tense, offbeat psychological short that taps into the paranoia of isolation and the fantasy of control. Equal parts thriller and satire, it’s a sharp meditation on watching—and being watched—when real connection feels just out of frame.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
HollyShorts 2025 August 7th through August 17th
