Likeness is about Kaitlyn, played by Mary Rose Branick, who is searching for her missing mother. To do this, she recruits an AI reconstruction of her mother depicted by Virginia Newcomb. It was written and directed by David A. Flores.

The acting is excellent. Kaitlyn is a mix of regret and self-destructive determination. The AI construct, Faux Fiona, brings up an interesting question regarding our better understanding of AI and how that affects the depiction of AI characters. Faux Fiona is a more shallow entity than Kaitlyn, but she is also just a database with a face that can only be as complex as the information she draws from allows her to be. I can’t fault the character for accuracy. The relationships are interesting because Kaitlyn’s relationship with Fiona and Faux Fiona are interconnected. It’s a major point of exploration. The evolution of Kaitlyn’s relationship with Faux Fiona is a little bumpy. The dialogue is good, as is the lighting and cinematography.

Likeness is a short that suffers for being a short. I want to appreciate the growth of Kaitlyn’s and Faux Fiona’s relationship, but that’s hard for me to do when there are so many time jumps for something that is roughly 14 minutes. There is an entire mystery here that is underdeveloped. It is clear that this is more about the emotional toil and growth of Kaitlyn than the mystery, but you can’t make a mystery a major part of the plot and expect people to be able to separate it from everything else. This is not a tale that is interested in depicting an entertaining or engrossing investigation. Some things are clear but unsaid. That’s great. Other things are simply unclear. This doesn’t hurt the experience for me because I am circumstantially OK with choosing my own adventure, but it doesn’t help because not everyone will be. Some scenes ought to have been inherently suspenseful, but they fell flat for me. Overall, Likeness is well constructed on a technical level, but it does struggle with balancing all of its elements.