Siddharth Chauhan

  Hypermediacy, Corporate Apologia, and the Rupture of the Screenlife Suture in the Era of Streamed Surveillance Capitalism The evolution of "screenlife" cinema—a term coined by filmmaker and producer Timur Bekmambetov to describe narratives unfolding exclusively across the digital interfaces of computers, smartphones, and surveillance ecosystems—has reached a critical, highly contradictory crossroad. What began as a radical, low-budget guerrilla aesthetic designed to capture the claustrophobia of contemporary desktop existence has been hyper-commodified by the global entertainment apparatus. The absolute flashpoint of this transformation is Bekmambetov’s Mercy (2026), a $60 million science-fiction thriller produced by Amazon MGM Studios starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson. Set in a dystopian 2029 Los Angeles, Mercy presents an authoritarian legal landscape where a defendant is strapped into a "Mercy Chair," presumed guilty, and given a strict 90-minute w...

One-Shot Cinema Reimagined: A Case Study of Netflix's Adolescence (2025) How Philip Barantini's Continuous-Take Direction Redefines Television Storytelling Introduction In contemporary cinema and television, the continuous take—or "one-shot" technique—has evolved from a technical curiosity into a powerful storytelling device. Rather than relying on rapid editing, filmmakers use uninterrupted camera movement to immerse audiences within unfolding events, creating an experience that closely resembles real-time observation. While films such as Rope (1948), Russian Ark (2002), Birdman (2014), Victoria (2015), and 1917 (2019) have expanded the possibilities of long-take filmmaking, Netflix's Adolescence (2025) represents a significant milestone by extending the technique across an entire four-episode television series. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini, Adolescence is a four-part British crime drama that follows the Mille...