Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
As the vaporetto pulled out of San Marco and veered east toward the Lido, I decided I’d kick off my tenth trip to the Venice Film Festival doing something I’d never done before: visit its Extended Reality section. Tucked away on a little island that once served as a leper colony, Venice Immersive is home to dozens of VR projects slotted in competitive and non-competitive programs every year. I had no idea what to expect from this edition, though a cursory glance at the menu suggested a motif. Aside from titles that vowed to explore new formats and ideas around spectatorship, there were several that felt true to our era of anxious, restless doomscrolling. Catastrophes, tragedies, and crises were at the cornerstone of the handful of works I saw, including Asio Chihsiung Liu and Feng Ting Tsou’s Somewhere Unknown in Indochina, a study of a Vietnamese refugee camp in Taiwan and its survivors, and Arif Khan’s Address Unknown: Fukushima Now, a look at the city as remembered by those who lived there at the time of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. It was my first time wearing a VR set at a film festival, and I left wondering why I’d waited so long to try, why filmgoers seldom talk about the relationship between the medium and our bodies in a way the VR experience was inviting me to—but also, and perhaps most importantly, I wondered if these projects were also suggesting something about the role cinema has taken up in our troubled times.
A few days have passed since that impromptu trip, but like Khan’s virtual tour of Fukushima, the strongest titles I’ve caught so far in Venice all seem drenched in a curious fatalism. They assume, each in their own way, that we already are doomed, no longer grappling with some inconvenient if still avertable eventualities but with ineluctable facts. If the catastrophe has started, then maybe the best we can hope is for cinema to turn into a kind of time machine, a means to immortalize how we used to be for the edification of future generations. Take No Sleep Till. Produced by Omnes Films, the same house that spawned two of this year’s best Cannes premieres—Carson Lund’s Eephus and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point—Alexandra Simpson’s feature debut is powered by the same friction that fueled those two films: between our need for community and the forces that inevitably pull us apart. In Eephus, a gaggle of middle-aged amateur baseball players met at the local field for one last game before their hangout is to be paved over and replaced by a new middle school; it isn’t just some sports grounds Lund invites us to mourn, but a way of being among each other. In Christmas Eve, an Italian American family gathers at the old matriarch’s Long Island home for one final yuletide reunion before the place will be put on the market. In Simpson’s film, the catalyst is a catastrophe of a much larger scale. Set in Florida, No Sleep Till opens with warnings of a powerful hurricane on its way to hit the coast. But Simpson isn’t as interested in charting an environmental disaster as she is in exploring the way people internalize a looming crisis; like Brett Story’s The Hottest August (2019), hers is a film attuned to how news about the planet’s collapse influences the way we carry ourselves into the world and understand our role within it. 
No Sleep Till (Alexandra Simpson, 2024).
It is also, in keeping with its Omnes Films cousins, a decidedly choral portrait. Simpson, who also penned the script, trades a univocal point of view for a collage of distinct voices and storylines. A small pantheon of characters braces for the worst, among them a storm chaser and a couple of local stand-up comedians who parlay the approaching apocalypse into a chance to leave town for good and seek glory up North. Shot by Sylvain Marco Froidevaux, No Sleep Till offsets its funereal premise with a whimsical, neon-soaked palette, leaving motels, pools, and diners aglow with lush reds and blues. It’s in these places that most of the action unfolds; not unlike Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017), the landscape is reduced to a succession of increasingly empty liminal spaces. But what’s so riveting about Simpson’s film is its ability to flesh out that void in both spatial and emotional terms. At its heart lies an unresolved contradiction between the way the storm brings strangers together and the inescapable loneliness each of them harbors; it’s as if the hurricane hasn’t demagnetized just their survival instincts, but their emotional and social compasses, too. Instead of well-rounded characters or “complete” storylines, No Sleep Till traffics in intimations and clues—and it is all the more eloquent for it. What you’re left with is a series of vignettes perched between ineffable sadness and magic; time and again, Froidevaux trains his camera on sights that pull the journey into a dreamlike region: the reflection of a motel sign undulating on a swimming pool, a giant cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley shaking in the wind, a lone BMX rider doing tricks in a deserted parking lot. In a work this sinuous, these are not digressions, but the very fabric of the film. Simpson summons Florida in intimate infinitesimals that suggest vast personal histories, and she crafts a distinctive aesthetic to bring its drifters—and their solitude—into the light. Of all the debuts I’ve seen at Venice this year, Simpson’s struck me as the most auspicious; I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with next.
Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024).
No Sleep Till premiered in the Critics Week, proof that the finest titles on the Lido are often found outside the official competition. Further evidence came in the shape of Neo Sora’s Happyend, another festival highlight from the Orizzonti sidebar. Following a string of shorts and a concert film of his late father’s last performance, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (2023), Sora’s first feature-length foray into fiction is also haunted by an imminent cataclysm. Set in “near-future” Japan, Happyend imagines a country wrestling with the specter of a “once-in-a-century” earthquake, whose threat is being turned by an authoritarian government into an opportunity to tighten its grip on society. The promise of disaster calls for harsher security measures; the PM’s mantra, “safety first,” trumps all civil liberties. So it is with the high school where much of Happyend unfolds. Following a prank on the principal, the institution quickly sets up a new surveillance mechanism (“Panopti”—what else?) to ensure all pupils will be closely watched and punished through a point-based system designed to forbid the most innocent activities, from loitering to hugging and making out. Such preoccupations with monitoring devices inform the film’s aesthetic, with Bill Kirstein’s cinematography often reverting to CCTV-like high-angle shots. Sora’s script, in turn, centers on five classmates and techno enthusiasts led by Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), the two teens behind the stunt. Yuta is rich; Kou is not. Yuta is Japanese; Kou’s Korean ancestry compels him to always carry his Special Permanent Card. Happyend charts the boys’ political awakening, tracking them as they confront authoritarianism and rethink their place in society; if their character arcs can occasionally feel formulaic, Sora imbues their paths with enough oomph as to make this a cumulatively incendiary cri de coeur.
That’s all the more impressive in a tale that routinely swells into a kind of symposium. The real catastrophe, as Sora sees it, isn’t the earthquake everyone is preparing for, but our own passivity toward—if not outright complicity with—injustice. Happyend teems with heated and serious conversations, yet the young cast never gives in to heavy-handed speechifying. Even the most portentous lines (“It’s wrong to follow a society that’s wrong”) always bristle with real urgency, recalling the university debate with which Mati Diop closed her Dahomey (2024). For a film set in a lugubrious tomorrow, a story of Orwellian policing and high tech deployed to fascistic ends, there is something so anachronistic—and ultimately so uplifting—about Happyend’s belief in the power of words and human bonds, in the way friendships and conversations can help us survive and avoid crises. I was interested to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s name among the “thanks” credits; when I asked Sora about it, the day after Happyend’s premiere, he said Hamaguchi had advised him on how to handle nonprofessional and first-time actors, and that he’d also used Hamaguchi’s affectless approach to script read-throughs as the basis for his own rehearsals. But the connection goes a lot deeper than that. Sora and Hamaguchi seem to share the same belief in the potential of the collective, the way change can only be brought about by the many. In Happyend, that fertile tension—between the film’s concerns with a dystopian future and its faith in something as ancient as our capacity to organize and resist—is Happyend’s prime success, and what accounts for its rebellious spirit.
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).
“The systems that defined people are crumbling in Japan,” a title card remarks early into Happyend, which is as good a way as any to think about the cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Bafflingly slotted in the out-of-competition sidebar, his latest, Cloud, is another early standout, a work that both distills some of the director’s motifs and heralds intriguing departures. In his review of Kurosawa’s other 2024 release, Chime, a mid-length feature that follows a man haunted by an otherworldly sound, Adam Nayman described the filmmaker’s “cinema of contagion,” in which “carefully balanced urban ecosystems get upended by some invading physical or psychic force.” The same holds true for Cloud. Horror, for Kurosawa and other Japanese directors that began tackling the genre around the turn of the millennium, has always been inextricably linked with technology, flowing out of computer screens (Pulse, 2001) and defying all rational explanations (Cure, 1997). But Cloud suggests a slight variation to the formula, tethering its occult detours to another beast: capitalism. A hustler who makes a living purchasing things and reselling them online at astronomically higher prices, its hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a paragon of our 21st-century gig economy. Having made a small fortune scamming people with some obscure “miraculous therapy devices,” he quits his job at a small Tokyo factory and relocates to a lakeside house with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa). But no sooner does the couple move in than strange things start to happen. Omens, mysterious sightings, and accidents initially nudge Cloud into the same spectral terrain of Kurosawa’s older J-horrors, before the writer-director shifts genres altogether, unleashing a pack of hit men and enraged customers and turning the film into a bloody manhunt.
Yet the approach to sounds and visuals that made those earlier films so terrifying remains. Few filmmakers working today are as skilled at conjuring atmospheres as Kurosawa; fewer still can make those moods so recognizable that you only need a few seconds to guess whose film you’re watching. Throughout, I was reminded of how deftly Kurosawa employs empty space; shot by Yasuyuki Sasaki (Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s cinematographer in Asako I & II, 2018), the camera often captures characters in deep-focus wide shots that take in their surroundings, too, leaving you with the feeling that horror can creep in from anywhere, contaminating office spaces and scarcely furnished homes like a virus. But terror, in Kurosawa’s cinema, has always relied on diegetic noises to insinuate itself into one’s mind (think of the water hypnotically dripping to the floor in Cure). In Cloud, music is used very sparingly in favor of a creepy symphony of ambient sounds—ceilings creaking, house appliances turning on and off for no apparent reason. There are no ghosts, though the people around Yoshii come across as human chrysalides, void of interiority. To be clear: this is not an indictment. To criticize Kurosawa for the shallow characterization of some of these figures would be to completely misread the film’s register. Cloud plays as a modern-day capitalist farce, one whose players aren’t flesh-and-blood people but caricatures—like the throngs of angry clients determined to kill Yoshii; or his former boss turned stalker; or young assistant-cum-killing-machine Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a human Alexa whose sole drive is to make himself useful and ensure Yoshii can just “focus on making more money.” Early into the chase, one hit man reassures another: “Think of this as a game.” It’s a line that could just as well apply to Cloud itself, a work of wild tonal shifts carried through with playfulness and panache. 
Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries (Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, 2024).
After a handful of turgid biopics (see Pablo Larraín’s Maria) and hot-button projects (Errol Morris’s Separated), it was refreshing to happen into Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries, a film that didn’t strive for topicality but sought instead to probe the medium itself. A sprawling three-part documentary, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s latest is concerned with the relationship between cinema and its titular subjects—animals, plants, and stones. Its goal is astonishingly ambitious: to subvert our anthropocentric gaze and reveal how filmmaking has served as both an extension of imperialist projects and a tool to commit some of their most unspeakable atrocities to collective memory. Hopscotching across archival footage of scientific expeditions and animal tests (so graphic I often found myself looking away), Bestiaries posits that filmmaking evolved in parallel with instruments of violence, and that authoritarian regimes across Europe, hoped to glean from animal imagery the ability to predict and control their people’s behavior, too. Shot inside Padua’s botanical gardens, Herbaria is only superficially less confrontational; this Edenic oasis housing rare and exotic plants is a site of inclusion and exclusion, no less susceptible to the whims of those who (like filmmakers or programmers, for that matter) get to decide what to preserve and what to discard. If Bestiaries deals with archives and Herbaria adopts a more observational approach, Lapidaries is far more difficult to define, kicking off inside a cement factory and landing in a “stumbling blocks” workshop, where the concrete is used to craft cobblestones commemorating victims of the Holocaust.
If all this sounds like a long lecture, well, there’s no denying the film’s didactic detours. The first two chapters in particular make ample use of authoritative voices to chaperone us through the journey, relying on two archivists (Bestiaries) and experts (Herbaria) to decode all we see. But in keeping with D’Anolfi and Parenti’s grand design—to break down traditional ways of looking and open up new, non-human points of view—Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries gradually sheds those pedagogical impulses; by the end, their film invites us not to comprehend but to contemplate. What else can you do in the face of worlds so alien and distant from ours? Herein lies the documentary’s subversive power: cinema has long been deployed to decipher and capture, but D’Anolfi and Parenti push against those urges, treating these realms as the foreign and unknowable lands they are. And for all the gruesome visuals, wonders abound: a war herbarium dating back to the First World War is revealed to us as a little wunderkammer; the disintegration of rocks into sand is juxtaposed to shots of Italian “undesirables” assassinated under Mussolini’s rule; a penguin and an explorer in 1910s Antarctica tiptoe around each other in a human-animal dance that’s as close to a moment of transcendence as any I’ve seen thus far in the festival. How do we write about a work like this? How do we even watch it? Of all the pleasures a festival like Venice can offer, this is the one I find most rejuvenating: when a film defies words, when it asks us to think and begin anew.
Baby Invasion (Harmony Korine, 2024).
It’s the same feeling I nursed upon leaving Baby Invasion. The word “prank” has long been thrown at Harmony Korine’s oeuvre, and seemingly metastasized into the go-to descriptor for what remains, in my book, one of last year’s festival’s most memorable entries: Aggro Dr1ft (2023). Yet that film was no stunt, and neither is this. For all their insouciant, zero-fucks-given facades, the first two releases to come out of Korine’s new production house, EDGLRD, still respond to what seems to me a cogent and admirable project: to explore the interstices and overlaps between cinema and new technologies. Like Aggro Dr1ft, a feverish assault to the senses shot entirely in infrared and spruced up with augmented-reality and AI flourishes, Baby Invasion places us inside a nightmarish multiverse designed to ape our Very Online lives. But unlike its predecessor, Korine’s latest has no real plot to speak of. Not that the previous film’s tale of a Miami-based assassin offered much in the way of that, but it did have a villain, for one thing, as well as a trajectory, however circuitous, that made watching the film like following a video game character powering through different levels toward the inevitable clash with a monstrous nemesis. In Baby Invasion, the boundary between cinema and video game evaporates—and so do any pretenses of narrative. Unfurling exclusively from a first-person shooter perspective, the film looks and plays like a video game tracking the antics of a young criminal gang robbing and slaughtering the owners of opulent waterfront mansions around Florida, a mob whose faces are scrambled by AI and replaced with those of babies, their heads adorned with the same horned masks Korine debuted in Aggro.
Are we watching or participating? In this delirious and cacophonous world (Korine recruited British electronic musician Burial for the non-stop techno score, possibly more oppressive than that of Aggro Dr1ft), we’re never truly alone. The film/game is played by a masked kid who shows up intermittently on our screen, while the whole thing is accompanied by a Twitch-like live chat where viewers enthusiastically comment on the show (“Society’s finest art!” “Aint no rest for the horns!”). Which is another way of saying that Baby Invasion has a lot to look at, intercutting the gang’s murderous tours with a cascade of pop-ups, pictures, and icons—including pills, collectible coins, and assault weapons. Oh, and did I mention the rabbit that keeps bobbing up, whose mystical origin story we hear delivered by a female vocalist? “This is not a movie,” an intertitle warns us halfway through, nor is it a game or reality; it’s just “the endless now.” I can’t pretend I was on board throughout. This torrential Rorschach test of sounds and visuals gets repetitive rather quickly, and I sympathize with those who’ll leave the theater (or their laptops, since that’s presumably where this thing will play) with a bad case of motion sickness. But even at its least imaginative, Baby Invasion feels like something genuinely unique, an audiovisual oddity that admirably captures what it’s like to live in that “endless now,” when our attention is so often splintered across many competing screens. I do not know whether this is the new frontier of cinema, as Korine seems to believe. At the press conference for Baby Invasion last Saturday, he said movies “are no longer the dominant art form.” Perhaps. But those fears of obsolescence are really nothing new. What is new, and in the context of a festival as commercially minded as this so especially electrifying, is a film determined to turn those fears on their head and open up a space where cinema can exist in conversation with other media and come out revitalized from the encounter. A lot can happen in a week, and I’m hoping a disappointing official competition will finally start yielding some riches. But I have no doubt Baby Invasion will be one of the few titles I’ll keep going back to—long, long after my last vaporetto home.
Read all of our fall 2024 festival coverage here.