Ah, the humble Notes app. The mobile equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer, filled with our brains’ detritus—half-formed thoughts, website passwords, and abandoned shopping lists. It is unglamorous, and, on the surface, a rather banal tool poorly suited to being the centerpiece of drama. However, UK filmmaker Trim Lamba sees this uncurated archive in a different light—as a secret autobiography hiding in plain sight.

Sticky Notes is a delightfully unnerving new film from Lamba, featured first on this site nearly a decade ago with Cracked Screen: A Snapchat Story. That film is the rare short to see its reputation grow over time. Its groundbreaking conceit, telling a shocking thriller through the form of Snapchat stories and shot using the app itself, caught the imagination of a culture and creative community that was just beginning to absorb the implications of short-form video and the voyeurism of social media broadcasting. The short has subsequently been acquired for permanent preservation by the BFI as a notable contribution to British film history. This new short is a spiritual sequel—told only using the Notes app and a synthesized voice-over, it unspools the story of a man who buys a second-hand iPhone and discovers thousands of entries left behind by its former owner. Those fragments gradually cohere into an intimate portrait of a mind coming apart. The result is a formally fascinating urban legend that implicates its audience in a slow-rolling invasion of privacy.

In the short, the former owner of the phone is an accountant-turned-outsider artist, and faux-naive doodles using the app’s meager tools provide the visual ballast for the film. Cycling through these images, accompanied by the author’s stray musings, provides a carefully modulated drip of exposition, and is also the source of a grubby, almost childlike pleasure: the feeling of finding an unlocked diary and realizing nobody can stop you from reading. Notes and doodles accumulate, and disconnected thoughts begin to suggest patterns and increasingly alarming disclosures. Each new entry appears to promise a clearer understanding of the stranger behind the phone, yet only makes the picture more unstable. Every revelation rewards our curiosity even as it makes that curiosity harder to defend. The mystery is not simply what happened to the author, but how long we—and the phone’s new owner—are willing to keep trespassing in order to find out.

That compact between film and viewer is where Sticky Notes becomes most unnerving. Lamba calls its gradual unfolding a “narrative striptease,” and the description captures both its pleasure and its violation. We enjoy assembling the fragments, converting somebody’s apparent distress into clues and rewarding ourselves each time a new piece fits. One member of our team could not tell whether Lamba had created the notes or genuinely found them on a stranger’s phone. “If these are real sticky notes,” they said, “I’m not sure how I feel about using them for entertainment.” The reaction is a testament to Lamba’s skill, but also articulates the film’s ethical trap perfectly. If the entries are fabricated, reading them is harmless fun; if they are real, the same pleasure becomes grotesquely exploitative. Yet our fascination in either case depends upon entertaining the possibility that they might be genuine.

This tension thrives because the intimacy of the notes is genuinely uncomfortable. Lamba describes the Notes app as “not just for life admin and clumsy WiFi passwords,” but as a “confessional vault” for our fears, secrets, fantasies, and lies. That insight gives Sticky Notes a weight beyond its clever conceit and invites the film to be examined as not just formally related to Cracked Screen as a “phone thriller” but as a companion piece thematically as well. Both films create cinema via the grammar of a familiar app and make the viewer complicit in what unfolds. Yet they move in opposite directions. Cracked Screen is outward-facing, finding horror in social surveillance and the calculated performance of a life for public consumption. Sticky Notes turns inward, toward the parts of ourselves we deposit on our phones precisely because we believe nobody else will ever see them. In the earlier film, the phone is a stage; here, it is a locked room.

This connects to society’s evolving fears over a decades-long time. Amidst a current crisis of isolation and loneliness, the film’s deepest horror is not necessarily that the former owner might be dangerous, but that nobody appears to have known how badly they were unraveling. We live in a moment when people increasingly confide in devices rather than one another: into Notes, into ChatGPT, into any private field that will receive what they cannot say aloud. We are, in Lamba’s words, “screaming into a digital void.” In Sticky Notes, somebody finally hears—but only by accident, and perhaps too late.

Sticky Notes is unlikely to create the stir Cracked Screen did ten years ago; Lamba’s earlier film arrived when storytelling native to social platforms still felt like a new frontier. Yet this companion piece is every bit as assured, and its achievement is more than the successful repetition of a formal trick. By moving from Snapchat’s performative broadcast to the Notes app’s desperate insularity, Lamba maps how our relationship with our phones has changed—and how loneliness has flourished inside that change. Cracked Screen found horror in the fact that everyone was watching. Sticky Notes finds it in the possibility that, until now, no one was.