Warning — a sci-fi anthology on what loneliness looks like after technology wins

Warning is structured as an anthology — six interlocking stories, each set in a near-future Earth where omniscient technology has replaced what people used to provide for each other. The characters are not living under oppression. They are living with convenience, and the film is interested in what that comfort quietly erodes. A meteor shower cuts the electronics, and lives that seemed stable reveal what was holding them together — or what wasn’t.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0EtHm79YFE

Written by Alexander alongside Jason Kaye and Rob Michaelson, Warning marked Agata Alexander’s directorial debut and premiered at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival. The ensemble cast is broad — Annabelle Wallis, Alice Eve, Rupert Everett, and Thomas Jane among the leads, alongside Alex Pettyfer, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Charlotte Le Bon — which reflects the film’s structural ambition. Six storylines require that kind of population.

Alexander does not set out to frighten. Warning draws comparisons to Black Mirror but leans away from that show’s pressure to deliver dread. What the film seems genuinely interested in is the slower damage: the way that when technology handles communication, coordination, and comfort, the muscle for doing those things without it atrophies. Whether that quieter approach works depends on which story you’re in. The stronger segments use the anthology format honestly — each one a precise isolation ward, not a plot machine.

The cinematography earns attention. Alexander and her team work with careful contrast and deliberate framing, treating near-future environments with something close to patience. The visual effects are functional rather than impressive, which matters less here than it would in a larger-budget production; Warning’s concerns are human-sized, and the camera stays at that scale.

The film is uneven in the way anthology films tend to be — not every segment carries equal weight, and the interconnections between stories are sometimes more structural than felt. The near-future setting is plausibly rendered but not deeply built, which leaves some characters stranded in exposition rather than situation. Alexander’s debut shows what she’s looking at more clearly than it shows her controlling it.

Warning is not a comfortable film or a particularly commercial one, which may be the point. Six near-future stories about what disappears when technology absorbs human contact — it is a specific argument, not a universal warning, and that specificity is what makes the better segments linger.