Tears In The Rain, the award-winning South African sci-fi short by filmmaker Christopher Grant Harvey, is an unabashed love letter to the 1982 motion picture 'Blade Runner', and Philip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?'
Set in Los Angeles in the latter part of the twenty-first century, the short stars Sean Cameron Michael as John Kampff, a mysterious law enforcement official who is tracking down a man named Andy Smith (Russel Savadier), who is suspected of being a replicant: an artificial being almost indistinguishable from humans.
With its haunting, 80s-inspired synthesized score, futuristic Los Angeles cityscape complete with flying cars, looming ultra-skyscrapers, and neon-haloed, grime covered streets, Tears In The Rain convincingly duplicates the dark dystopian aesthetic of Blade Runner.
In a dystopian Los Angeles future, replicants or genetically engineered humanoids are created to work forced labour on off-world colonies. The latest generation, the Nexus 3 series, begins to display erratic and violent behaviour. Replicants were not designed to experience complex emotions or develop long-term memories. In the wake of corporate scandals of the previous decade, the Tyrell Corporation quietly attempts to remove Nexus 3 from circulation.
John Kampff (Sean Cameron Michael), a senior engineer, heads up the Tyrell Retirement Division. With the primary objectives, detect and remove Replicants, John has suspected Nexus 3 Andy Smith (Russel Savadier) firmly in his sights. As John soon learns, Replicant detection is nearly impossible without specialist equipment. The Voight-Kampff, a polygraph-like machine used by retirement engineers to help in the testing of an individual to learn if they are a replicant, is a distant thought in John Kampff's mind.