RUN TOWARDS

Run Towards is a throwback to the analogue age. No touch screen tech, no apps.

We see a solitary runner in a desolate place. Societies rules communicated through a voice on a cassette. How to act, how to behave, how to excel, how to belong.

She runs to be free, to escape the narcissistic nightmare.

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If you ever wondered what a running app in George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eight-Four’ would sound like,

this short from RSA’s Gray Hughes offers a compelling approximation.

A runner is propelled by the clinical voice of Towards.

Forget couch to 5K – this training programme has a more sinister agenda.

The script – delivered with controlled wrath by Carolyn Backhouse – splices sports science with Newspeak.

“Left foot before right foot” becomes an unsettling refrain, while Towards’s concept of well-being is questionable, at best.

What follows is a battle of wills between the runner and her ‘coach’.

When technology makes a quantum leap from Walkman to smartphone, however, we realise what fired the starting pistol on this distance run. Darkly enthralling.