I stumbled upon this gritty short film from 2013. It’s a future scenario where most of the population is plugged into fully immersive VR 24/7. They are all in there voluntarily and there is some life support system that can sustain their physical body. One man exits the VR and talks to his father, who is strongly in the anti-VR camp. The mother had apparently died previously due to a malfunction of the life support.
The father is doing real paint-on-canvas painting. The son tries to extoll the virtues of tech, including using a hologram to project all possible iterations of the painting when finished. Kinda cool depiction AI for 2013. Also a depiction of “fake news” as a dissonance between the virtual hive mind and what’s happening politically IRL. All visionary for 2013!
It’s a very gritty movie, and definitely falls into that whole “slaves to technology” genre. Here’s the entire short film:
