Pluribus(2025)

Pluribus builds its near-future America around a single unsettling premise: happiness has become mandatory, and almost no one is left to notice. The pacing is investigative and slow-burning, parceling out what the "wave" actually is and who is behind it across a story that treats revelation as something to be earned rather than delivered.

Carol Sturka's immunity is less a superpower than a burden; she moves through a world of placid, smiling faces while carrying the full weight of dread that everyone else has been stripped of. That isolation shapes the thriller's texture, which is paranoid and philosophical rather than action-driven. The central pressure is not survival in any physical sense but the question of whether truth itself can be recovered once a society has been made to stop wanting it.