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Some days ago, Ayokunle Odunsi, a creative director and artist, popularly known for creating sounds from some of his unreleased songs on Tiktok in the Nigerian community, posted a snippet of his film ‘Plantain and Egg’, I sent it to a friend, who's also a filmmaker— half in jest and mostly because I didn’t understand the concept of the film but this friend seemed to adequately parse its meaning, or perhaps I grasped onto a message I fabricated myself after experiencing my friend’s positive reaction in contradiction to mine. What one person takes for granted, another holds in high regard and the influence rubs off. Looking at my screen, I watched Ayo do what I’d consider as nothing but it was all the things I’d do in my day that were filler experiences rather than experiences of weight or significance.
Slowness in media feels like an aggravated performance of the mundane. I’m trying to figure out if it’s because it’s in the way of my expectation of an event or whether I feel disconnected completely from reality. When I looked back at Ayo’s work, I realized he wasn’t doing “nothing”—he was doing life. But our, maybe mine and not yours, attention spans, frayed by the velocity of social media and the saturation of overstimulating content, struggle to receive stillness as intentional or meaningful. Movement, escalation, drama is used to lure in and hold attention in smaller quantities as seen on Tiktok or Youtube that outside that rhythm, it starts to feel like a glitch and a waste of time.
The category of what critics often call “mundane cinema” Films like, Perfect Days, Elisa and Marcela, Past Lives, Days of Heaven and Youtube content by creators like Thriv3ng. A growing genre of independent and arthouse cinema is purposefully committed to portraying the “nothingness” of life: the quiet in-between spaces that our hyper-productive world tells us to ignore. The realism of these scenes—rooted in routine, time, and silence clashes with our need for narrative payoff. In a media economy that rewards virality, the absence of speed feels like a flaw. Across literature, television, and film, there is a subtle resistance that embraces the mundane, stretches time, and asks us to simply be with the art. And in doing so, it reveals just how unfamiliar we’ve become with patience, attention, and presence.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to film. It spans across books, podcasts, even YouTube essays. Content creators are told to hook audiences within the first three seconds. Novels are marketed on the promise of being “unputdownable” or “a fast-paced read.” TV shows now skip credit sequences, compress character arcs, and drop entire seasons at once because viewers no longer tolerate the old rhythms of suspense and slow burn. Even music videos are edited with increasingly rapid cuts to match our eye’s newly trained appetite for stimulation.
Since the internet learned about instant gratification, “skip intro” buttons, and short-form dopamine loops have made their way to the forefront of our entertainment intake, media that dares to slow down feels almost rebellious. Whether it’s a meandering plot in a film, a scene where characters sit in silence, or a novel that takes its sweet time unfurling, this deliberate pacing is a mirror. A mirror reflecting the speed at which our attention unravels the moment we aren’t entertained on cue. From TikTok scrolling habits to the surge in audio-visual content designed to trigger, jolt, or distract, we’ve grown accustomed to content moving fast enough to hold our attention. So when a film, book, or show slows down, we often mistake it for boring. But what if that "boredom" is actually pointing us back to something we’ve lost?
Reading Akwaeke Emezi’s work makes me realize the same, Akwaeke invites you to sit with the emotions as relevant to the plot and It is assumed that they stretch the story out further than it should. “You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty” is not what you’d typically label as “slow.” In fact, it thrives on exaggeration— grief, romance, betrayal, and desire tangled in a story that moves with reckless emotional speed. But therein these feelings are derived from the deepening of the words to explain the weight of the story. We consume such heightened realities at a fast pace that they offer intensity without the wait. Emezi’s narrative allows readers to sit still. In some ways, this type of exaggerated fiction caters to an audience so used to stimulation that emotional depth being delivered in a whisper feels less relevant than the usual punch.
On Netflix’s ”The Residence”, a murder mystery set in the White House that drags viewers through a prolonged whodunit. A corpse is found. Suspects are lined up. But the investigation stretches across episodes not because of elaborate twists, but because of the show's desire to examine the concept of a process. Conversations meander. Red herrings overstay their welcome. And audiences accustomed to fast reveals and neatly packaged crime solving grow impatient. Yet this patience-testing pace is unintentionally asking us to sit with uncertainty, to pay attention to nuance, to remember how real investigations and emotions actually work.
We are, in many ways, becoming intolerant of stillness. Our attention spans being reprogrammed. Fast-paced editing, algorithm-driven content, autoplay, and short-form videos have trained our brains to constantly expect the next beat. With an increasing amount of people claiming they watch movies at 1.5x or 2x speed, studies on film editing and viewer perception reveal that the average shot length in Hollywood movies has decreased from 12 seconds in the 1930s to about 2.5 seconds today. This shift, researchers argue, is about keeping up with attention-deficient audiences. The moment a scene lingers too long, we disengage. Not because it lacks value, but because we’ve forgotten how to wait.
The preservation of slow media like films that embrace silence, books that stretch emotion over pages, podcasts that linger is not without significance. It represents cognitive resistance to a culture that conflates speed with value. These works don’t just slow the story down; they slow us down. They ask us to recalibrate how we watch, read, and listen. They ask us to be present. And that’s perhaps the hardest ask in today’s content economy.
The discomfort we feel is not necessarily with the media but with ourselves. With how rewired we’ve become. With how difficult it is to just wait. In a time when even a 2-minute video feels “long,” realistic slowness in media is revelatory. And maybe, just maybe, it’s inviting us back to the richness that only slowness can offer.
