HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED

In just under eight minutes, "HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED" manages to tap into a discomfort so familiar it’s almost invisible: the uneasy normalcy of being watched. But this isn’t your average paranoia thriller—Maguire and Greenberg’s short plays more like a quiet, handheld act of defiance. It’s not warning us about surveillance; it’s showing us how deeply we've already internalised it.

Structured as a meta-documentary and stitched together through layers of digital detritus—Ring cam footage, 360-degree clips, degraded VHS—the film reconstructs a seemingly mundane walk taken by Maguire through LA’s Valley. But the reconstruction is the point. In revisiting the banal, the film exposes its slow-burn horror: that our most ordinary moments are no longer private. Maguire isn’t chased by a killer. She’s haunted by the architecture of observation itself.

What makes the film truly unnerving is its refusal to declare a villain. There's no single gaze to identify, no master controller behind the cameras—just an ambient, inescapable presence. It's the ring doorbell, the neighbour’s security cam, the passive threat of being "captured" at any given moment. And yet, the film doesn’t sensationalise this. Instead, it lingers on the emotional residue: the alienation, the absurdity, the quiet resentment of having to perform even while doing nothing.

The film’s power lies in its tension between exposure and invisibility. On one hand, Maguire—both subject and storyteller—controls the narrative. On the other, her presence is fragmented by the very mediums she uses: distorted, surveilled, depersonalised. It becomes a sly commentary on self-curation in the digital age. Even when we're behind the camera, are we ever really in control?

Los Angeles, often romanticised as a city of spectacle, is rendered here as sterile, disconnected, and vaguely hostile. The suburban sprawl of Woodland Hills is depicted not as a haven, but as a site of passive-aggressive territorialism—where stepping outside isn’t just unusual, it’s suspicious. In that sense, the film isn’t just about surveillance culture—it’s about how surveillance has reshaped public space. Walkability isn’t freedom. It’s exposure.

Technically, the film is sparse but intentional. Its lo-fi textures and jarring audio transitions are not aesthetic quirks—they are thematic devices. The patchwork format mirrors the fragmented self left behind in a surveilled world. What emerges is a portrait of someone trying to piece together their own presence from a series of mediated echoes.

In the end, HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDEDoffers no escape, no grand revelation. But that’s exactly what makes it so sharp. It suggests that the true horror isn’t being watched—it’s forgetting what it felt like not to be.

Maguire and Greenberg haven’t made a horror film in the traditional sense. They’ve made something quieter, more insidious, and frankly more relevant: a compact, claustrophobic mirror held up to a world where every walk is a performance, and every performance is someone else’s property.