The fascinating spectre of the "Mechanical Turk", a chess-playing automaton that hid a real player, rears its head in the opening moments of this mock-doc-cum-existential-comedy from Funny Ha Ha director Andrew Bujalski.

Shot on authentically grainy early 80s video cameras, the film follows a conference of socially inept geeks struggling to teach bulky computers to play a game once considered the very index of human intelligence, only to discover that the machines are becoming moody.

Crossing paths with a self-awareness couples group sharing the conference hotel, the programmers are variously prodded into (artificial?) interaction with profoundly awkward results. Odd, but in a good(ish) way.