Nimic

A professional cellist and family man is riding the subway home from a rehearsal when he asks a woman whether she has time. She repeats the question back to him, then follows him through the rest of his day, copying his every move, and the encounter ends up altering his life in ways he could not have anticipated. The short film, running twelve minutes, blends drama with fantasy, mystery and thriller elements, and follows a man whose ordinary routine is disrupted by a stranger who mirrors him.

Yorgos Lanthimos directed and co-wrote the film with Efthymis Filippou. It arrived in 2020, between The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), the ninth feature-length directing credit listed for him. Matt Dillon plays the father, Daphné Patakia plays the mimic, and Susan Elle, Sara Lee, Eugena Lee and Rowan Kay round out the family roles. Adam Saward, Rebecca Boswell and Polly Kemp produced, with 95 crew credited.

The film was made across Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, through Merman, Rekorder Berlin Filmproduktion and Superprime Films. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.5 out of 10 from around 10,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.6 out of 10 from 323 votes. The two audience scores are close, indicating a modest but broadly consistent response to this short, whose premise of a copied life fits alongside the director's other work.