With dizzying cinematography and break-neck suspense, director Simon Bouisson plunges the audience into the paranoid world of surveillance stalking with his marvelous first feature Drone. Alone in Paris for the first time as she begins architecture school, Émilie (ballerina-turned-actor Marion Barbeau) makes ends meet as a private camgirl for male strangers online, despite being otherwise uninterested in men in the real world. Slow to warm to her new surroundings and classmates, outside of the alluring Mina (The Advent Calendar’s Eugénie Derouand), her loneliness quickly morphs into a sense of paranoia when she realizes she’s being followed on the streets and watched in her apartment by a mysterious drone.
As Émilie attempts to unveil the operator behind the drone — a tech-savvy client? A stalker from the university? A total stranger? — it becomes clear that Drone is more than just a taut thriller; it’s a riveting investigation of the male gaze through the lens of our current crop of tech innovations.