Vision unfolds over a gripping arc — and within its short running time (10 minutes and 40 seconds), the filmmaker-writer’s grasp over filmmaking craft is obvious — in the way he builds up momentum for a climactic twist within the four walls of a swank hotel. The film has terrific production value and the cinematography by Umesh Chandra Javagi is an additional propeller to the overall bite of the narrative.

A Chennai-born filmmaker who was more attuned to Hollywood time travel films after watching Robert Zemeckis’ classic Back to the Future (1985) than Tamil cinema. His cinephile father introduced him to VHS tapes of all the Hollywood films the father-son duo could get their hands on from a video lending library in Chennai. “I knew from then that I was only interested in learning filmmaking. Thankfully, unlike many Tamil parents when we were growing up, my parents never forced me to be an engineer. They were ok with me pursuing filmmaking,” Rajan says.

Having worked in Chennai as a junior artiste and producing and directing education videos for YouTube, he left for Dubai for a job in graphic design in 2021. “I discovered a small but vibrant community of actors, screenwriters and directors in Dubai. I would work at my office, and while on my one-hour commute to and fro between office and home, I would write my scripts.” The cast in vision is entirely from the community of expat actors living and working in Dubai.

The titular “vision” is a time travel experience that a butler at a luxury Hotel (Tea Zwarych) acts upon, unleashing a chain of events that requires intervention by an expert. A family checks in to a hotel room that the butler is taking care of — squeaking every corner clean, ensuring there is no threat or discomfort for the guests and observing the guests to know what they want or need. Out of a moral imperative, the butler takes a decision that puts the reputation of the hotel and the lives of the guests in jeopardy. A scientist (Keith Allison) intervenes to save the unforeseen trouble, but whether he succeeds or not depends on factors that are also out of his control.

Rajan’s film couldn’t have come at a more apt time. What makes a super-efficient butler go rogue? Can artificially created workers develop moral prisms or emotions or intuition? And what happens if they go beyond what their creator imagined and programmed for them?

Vision throws up questions about AI-human collaboration that are not only relevant to the age, but also to our trepidations about the limits of AI. “It has become quite obvious by now that AI is crucial to the way creativity, judgement, ethics and morality will look like. If AI can’t be controlled by human intelligence, how far can it go? It’s a question I have thought about a lot,” Rajan said.

The filmmaker had to dumb down the theme of the film to suit the Paramount challenge. “The original script had a lot of bloodshed. I am now developing the story as a feature film script, where an AI sniper replaces the hotel butler, and how the main dilemma that the sniper is faced with, amid a lot of violence and gore, will change the lives of human beings and nations around him,” he added.

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Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian short film that hasn’t been seen before or not widely seen before but are making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section in hindustantimes.com.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com.