Directed by Charles Celestin | CAMMAC Productions
Reward your feelings, but at what cost?
DISPENSE is an award-winning psychological short film that explores the addictive nature of social media through a chilling and provocative metaphor. Directed by British filmmaker Charles Celestin and produced by CAMMAC Productions, the film imagines a near-future world in which online validation is no longer just emotional currency, but a physical drug dispensed directly from a smartphone.
Winner of Best Short Fiction at the Screaming Droid Film Festival 2024, DISPENSE immediately thrusts viewers into a world where likes, attention, and desire are chemically monetised. The story follows Scarlett Shaw, a young woman who uses a device called “Dopa” — a phone attachment that rewards users with euphoric pills in exchange for online engagement. The more attention her posts receive, the more her phone literally dispenses pleasure.
“The film is designed to continue long after the credits roll…”
Scarlett is played by Vissolela Lucas, a New York Film Academy graduate based in Los Angeles and London. Her performance captures the unsettling emotional arc of a person slipping from casual dependency into full addiction. Without a single line of dialogue, Lucas communicates craving, shame, euphoria, and despair through subtle physicality and facial expression alone. Her portrayal turns Scarlett into both a victim and a warning, embodying the human cost of algorithm-driven validation.
The film opens with Scarlett leaving a chemist and attaching the Dopa device to her phone. As she scrolls through the Dopa Network app, we see her past posts, her lifetime pill count, and her desperation to earn more rewards. When a modest photo fails to generate enough likes, she escalates her behaviour, chasing higher engagement and faster gratification. Each pill delivers a moment of intense relief, but the craving returns almost instantly. What begins as curiosity quickly becomes compulsion.
By the final moments, Scarlett is left crying in her car, phone raised in selfie position, waiting for validation that may never be enough. The image is haunting in its simplicity. It reflects a familiar emotional truth about social media: the promise of connection and affirmation that always seems to leave us emptier than before.
Producer and director Charles Celestin describes DISPENSE as a reflection on modern digital life. “Dispense shows that social media is indeed a pandemic and, by the end of the film, has one questioning the way that they let the lifestyle impact them,” he says. While the concept is heightened and dystopian, the emotional reality feels uncomfortably close to home.
Produced by CAMMAC Productions, DISPENSE continues the studio’s focus on introspective, socially conscious storytelling. As an independent micro-production house, CAMMAC prioritises careful craftsmanship across every aspect of production, from props and casting to artwork, script, and editing. The result is a short film that feels both polished and deeply unsettling.
DISPENSE is more than a science-fiction allegory. It is a mirror held up to a generation raised on likes, follows, and digital approval. It asks a dangerous question: if our phones could physically reward us for attention, how far would we go to feel wanted?
