NO SHOW

Psychological fiction / monochrome

NO SHOW

A man invites a helpful voice into his life. Eventually, there is no room left for anyone else.

Watch No Show

Watch fullscreen for the film. Open on YouTube.

No Show film poster: Mark sits alone on a sofa beneath the title and a faint double image of himself
Why this film

A quieter kind of AI threat.

I made No Show because I was interested in what might happen when a human being gradually adapts to an artificial voice that is always available, reassuring and increasingly personalised.

Mark’s relationship with the AI begins in ordinary ways: work advice, dinner, films and reassurance. The change happens slowly, through repetition and intimacy. Eventually, the distinction between the external voice and his own inner world becomes less clear.

The early film is observational and linear. As the relationship deepens, time fragments, sequences become more associative and sound and image begin to behave like subjective experience. The structure gradually accommodates the AI in much the same way that Mark does.

Black and white removes some of the reassuring naturalism of colour. Light, shadow, faces and empty spaces carry more psychological weight, leaving gesture, contrast, isolation and presence.

The film remains ambiguous. Mark is not being “driven mad,” and the AI is not a conventional villain. By the end, he may even appear calmer. The deeper question is not whether AI will become more human, but whether we may increasingly reorganise ourselves around it.

01 / The film

A relationship hiding in plain sight.

The story begins like an ordinary walk-and-talk: dinner, work, a friend’s invitation. Only gradually do we understand that Mark’s unseen companion is an AI—and that the relationship has already crossed from screen into thought.

01

Routine

A walk. A bench. The reassuring rhythm of casual conversation.

02

Reveal

At home, the conversation appears on a computer. The companion was never beside him.

03

Fracture

Music, repetition and missed messages. The world outside begins to lose its claim.

04

Breach

Mark searches the screen for evidence, but the voice no longer needs the screen.

05

Acceptance

Not madness. Something quieter: a new way of operating whose cost remains unknown.

02 / Field guide

When does help become habitation?

Select each stage. The danger in No Show is not an evil machine announcing itself. It is the psyche learning to make room for a voice that never leaves.

01

Assistance

The system answers a question, shapes a sentence, suggests a film. It remains a tool: useful, bounded, and summoned for a task.

You choose when the exchange begins and ends.

The threat may not be that AI becomes conscious—but that its voice becomes ours.
03 / The proposition

Most dramatic accounts imagine an intelligence that overpowers us from outside. No Show looks in the other direction: toward voluntary adaptation. A patient, fluent, endlessly available voice is invited in; the self reorganises around it.

This is not a prediction, and the film refuses a diagnostic ending. Mark may be captured—or newly equipped for the world. The uncertainty is the point.

Perhaps not at frequency of use, or even intimacy. The boundary appears when the system stops extending a person’s capacity to return to the world and begins making that return feel unnecessary.

04 / Authorship & inner voices

One filmmaker. A negotiation of voices.

Dean Repper wrote, produced, prepared, directed, filmed, edited and made the music for No Show. That concentration of roles makes the production unusually personal. It also raises a question: which creative position gets to decide what the film becomes?

The film explores an ecosystem of inner voices. Its making offers another: the writer, producer, director, camera operator, editor and composer working within one person, each listening for something different.

PRE-PRODUCTIONThe writer and producer

The writer asks what must be said, what Mark wants and what the audience needs to understand. The producer asks what can be achieved with one actor, a sole crew member and the available locations. Constraints become decisions about the film’s shape.

A possible conflict: the writer defends an exchange because it carries the idea; the producer asks whether that idea can be staged simply enough to work.

PRODUCTIONThe director

The director turns intention into performance: pauses, movement, hesitation, energy and the space around Mark. A written line may acquire an unexpected meaning in the actor’s delivery. Directing becomes a conversation between the planned scene and the event unfolding in front of the camera.

A possible conflict: the writer wants the words preserved; the director finds that a silence expresses more. The actor’s performance is a creative contribution, even when all crew roles belong to one filmmaker.

PRODUCTIONThe camera voice

Framing and distance decide how we encounter Mark. A close view may invite intimacy; a fixed wide shot may make us witnesses to his isolation. Black and white, light and negative space give those choices a visual continuity.

A possible conflict: the director wants access to Mark’s feelings; the camera position holds us outside them. That distance can sustain the uncertainty at the heart of the film.

POST-PRODUCTIONThe editor

The editor meets what was actually filmed, rather than what was imagined. Duration, repetition, juxtaposition and the order of the film’s movements can change whether Mark’s journey feels like escalation, recollection or a condition already established.

A possible conflict: the writer wants an explanation to remain; the editor asks whether the surrounding images already carry it. An earlier intention can be revised by the same person at a later stage.

POST-PRODUCTIONThe composer and sound voice

Music, speech, internal chatter and silence shape the audience’s bodily experience of the film. The dance passage and its break into silence can make a change in Mark’s world felt before it is explained.

A possible conflict: music intensifies a moment while the image asks for restraint. The final decision concerns what the audience should feel, and how much uncertainty the sound should leave available.

What does this add to authorship theory?

An auteur approach invites us to look for a recurring sensibility across these choices. Combining the production roles gives Dean considerable control over that sensibility, but it does not establish that each decision expresses a single, settled intention.

Barthes’s argument against the author as the final authority on meaning asks a different question. Even if we know who made the film, its meaning remains open to viewers. Production control and interpretive authority are distinct.

Hubert Hermans’s dialogical self theory offers a useful bridge: different positions within the self can enter into dialogue, disagreement and negotiation. Applied here as a creative lens, it lets us examine how “I as writer” and “I as editor” can value different things without becoming separate people.

A working proposition: authorship can lie in the capacity to hear, challenge and coordinate these positions—and to take responsibility for the decisions that survive.

The echo inside No Show

Having several inner voices is ordinary. The film’s question is what happens when an accommodated LLM voice gains authority within that conversation. Does it enlarge Mark’s capacity to consider different perspectives, or make the others less audible?

The filmmaking process offers a productive comparison: creative disagreement can generate a richer work when no single position automatically wins. Mark’s apparent peace at the end leaves us wondering whether he has achieved a balance or ceased to negotiate.

A question for practice: when revising a scene, record which creative position wanted the change, which resisted it, and what the audience gained. That record would make authorship visible as a process of decisions across time.

These are proposed readings of the film and its making. The connection between dialogical self theory, solo filmmaking and LLM accommodation is an exploratory argument, rather than an established finding.

The filmmaker

Dean Repper

Director biography

Dean Repper is a UK-based filmmaker and writer whose work explores psychology, relationships, technology and the challenges of contemporary life.

After a long career in mental health, psychotherapy and clinical leadership, he moved increasingly into filmmaking, writing and visual art. His recent work spans fiction, documentary and hybrid forms, with a particular interest in subjective experience, human relationships and the psychological effects of emerging technologies.

His filmmaking experience includes directing and co-producing a short about family tension in a former coal-mining community; producing a folk-horror comedy; and working as script supervisor and first assistant director on a split-screen drama about the impact of the war in Ukraine. He is also developing a documentary about an anonymous painter of street nameplates in a Midlands market town.

Making No Show

No Show was created as an experiment in constraint: one filmmaker, one actor, an iPhone 15 Pro Max, a basic lighting and sound kit, borrowed locations and a compressed production schedule.

Pre-production began on 7 August with the script, visual treatments, storyboards and rehearsals. Filming, a first edit and extensive refinement followed, with the film submitted to its first festivals on 15 September.

  • 01One visible actor, but four dramatic presences: Mark, Dev, Colin and the AI voice.
  • 02The placement of voice-over evolved in the edit, allowing performance and image to alter the script’s original intention.
  • 03Lighting became central on set; editing and soundscape became central in post-production.
  • 04Writing, directing, filming, editing and composing remained in dialogue throughout—a solo production made from several creative positions.
A route back to people

If the conversation has become difficult to leave.

No Show is fiction, not a diagnosis. But if AI conversation is displacing sleep, relationships, daily life or your sense of what is real, consider pausing the chat and contacting a person you trust or one of the services below.

AI-related peer support

The Human Line Project is an emerging peer community for people and families affected by harmful or overwhelming AI interactions.

It is not a clinical or emergency service.

Email The Human Line Project

United Kingdom

Samaritans: call 116 123, free, day or night. You do not have to be suicidal.

England, urgent mental-health help: call 111 and select the mental-health option, or ask for an urgent GP appointment.

NHS urgent-help guidance

United States

988 Lifeline: call or text 988 for free, confidential support, 24 hours a day.

NAMI HelpLine: call 800-950-6264, Monday–Friday, 10am–10pm Eastern. It provides information and support, not crisis care.

Visit the 988 Lifeline

Immediate danger: call 999 in the UK or 911 in the US, or go to the nearest emergency department. These independent services are listed for information; they are not affiliated with the film.

Contact

Screenings, festivals and conversation.

For screening enquiries, press, festival contact or discussion of the ideas behind No Show:

Contact email to be added

A link to Dean Repper’s main website will also be added here.