For a body horror nightmare, ELSE can be surprisingly beautiful.
It says something about the state of the world, or, at the very least, the collective mood, that the apocalypse is a prevalent concept among contemporary artists. At TIFF this year, several films tackled this fatalistic topic head-on, exploring cosmic dereliction through a litany of genres and registers, from high-budget passion projects to indie experiments. Last time, I broached the topic of Joshua Oppenheimer's divisive narrative feature debut, The End. Now, it's time for two other examples. There's Thibault Emin's feature-length adaptation of a pandemic short, Else. Secondly, an unexpected sci-fi proposition from Ukraine of all places, Pavlo Ostrikov's U Are the Universe. Both are love stories of sorts…
ELSE, Thibault Emin
From mesmerizing abstraction, the opening credits of Thibault Emin's feature debut cut to closeups of faces during sex. The proximity conveys its own abstracting quality to the familiar rut, suffusing the screen in a dream of sensuality, some blossoming romance. As it turns out, this pictorial trajectory of the film's opening will be repeated and inverted during Else's anemic narrative– this is one of those expansion projects that invariably feels like a short film stretched too thin and into feature length. Flesh shall become abstracted but, before we get there, Emin has a romantic comedy to stage, jumping from that introductory would-be one-night stand to a tentative, growing connection.
The lovers are a study in contrasts. Anx is anxious to a detrimental degree, timorous and unrepentantly hypochondriac, forever fretting over the sanctity of his apartment and salubrious body. Cass is a hurricane personified, some whimsical whirlwind that perspires chaos and recklessness from every pore. Perhaps opposites attract, or maybe their bond is singularly due to their lockdown situation. You see, their repeated trysts happen as a strange disease starts spreading worldwide, an epidemic given the Kafkaesque name of Metamorphosis. All life affected starts to merge into their environment, inanimate matter becoming an erosive extrapolation of the ill body.
It's difficult to explain and terrifying to witness, accomplished with miraculous design and effects work. To put it bluntly, it's astonishing what Emin accomplishes with limited resources, tracing the living hell of Anx and Cass as they struggle to survive, a difficult task made near impossible when the apartment itself seems to become a giant organism eager to digest its inhabitants. One of the most alarming concepts is that compassion may be the key to infection. Touch isn't so dangerous after all, as long as one doesn't glimpse the monster's eye. In that jolt of reciprocated humanity, a dark magic takes place and one's soul is doomed to disintegrate in the prison of a transfiguring biology.
That's one of various notions that become somewhat alarming when the spectator tries to parse what Emin is trying to say through this blatant COVID-19 allegory. Ambiguity and polysemy would be more easily accepted if the characters didn't feel so half-conceived, their interiorities ruled by plot necessities rather than a concrete narrative logic. The actors redeem some of it, but they're not all-powerful. Like their characters, the thespians are destined to be consumed whole until nothing remains but a faint impression of personhood. Yet, despite all these issues, there's something admirable about the places Else is willing to delve into, from the necessary physical filth of sex to its Human Instrumentality finale.
If there's one simple change that would instantly make the film more interesting, it would be to switch the POV one follows into the third act. But then, if that would jeopardize the film's best image, a vision of human curves fused to drapery in morbid mockery of ancient sculpture, I'm not sure the reversal would be worth it. Better accept the Else we have than to lose one's mind thinking of the one residing in the viewer's expectations. Incoherent, sometimes reductive, Emin's film has value as an act of reflected neurosis, a self-examination through the looking glass, or maybe a shattered kaleidoscope. One thing's for sure, Else presents body horror as you've seldom seen it before, a vehicle for romance and inevitable transcendence.
U ARE THE UNIVERSE, Pavlo Ostrikov
In the distant future of U Are the Universe, the world is full of radioactive waste, unsettled by earthquakes and spreading out of control. That's what its opening animation explains, a poppy corporate video extolling the value of the disposal industry, taking the dangerous materials from Earth to throw them in one of Jupiter's moons. It's "dirty work for a clean planet" chirps the terminally cheery cartoon. Considering what's to come, the hollow optimism feels worse than a lie. It's a slap in the face. But by this point in his life, our protagonist, Andriy, is used to the indignities of late-stage capitalism just as he's resigned to the bad jokes his companion insists on telling.
The clown's no person, however. He's merely a robot assistant whose priority is keeping Andriy well so he can complete the tasks assigned by the higher-ups. But no matter how many jokes the mechanized Maxim might have in his repertoire, they're not enough to lighten the mood once the unthinkable happens. One day, basking in the warm light of the dissolute spaceship, the 24/7 laborer listens to an old-school vinyl. In the background, through the small windows, the camera glimpses the big blue giant in its final moments. It begins as dots of light, pockmarks of nuclear surge that soon overwhelm the planet in a world-destroying explosion.
When hearing the news, Andriy assumes it's another joke, but there's no humor in Maxim's artificial consolations. Home is no more, and a man that already felt lonely suddenly finds himself as the last of his kind. Only, maybe not. Woken from a stupor after the shattered Earth threatens to destroy his vessel, Andriy discovers there's a French somebody out there, whose space station is drifting and in a route of collision. The rest of the film becomes a long conversation, mediated through futuristic translators and Catherine's caution. The unseen woman clearly prizes the knowledge she's not alone, but she might not be as ready to fall in love as Andriy.
A romance and a suicide mission hold hands for much of U Are the Universe's 101-minute runtime, singularly focused on Andriy's solipsistic self until the very last scene. It's thus impossible to overstate the sheer responsibility dropped on Volodymyr Kravchuk's shoulders as the film's leading man, tasked with sustaining the narrative edifice and often working against a script that wants to keep the protagonist's deepest interiority as a secret, maybe even from himself. His initial reluctance to cry the loss of all he's ever known may read false on a first impression, but it deepens in credibility as Kravchuck details the inner workings of his garbageman astronaut.
His performance isn't the only high point of U Are the Universe but the most salient one. In part because the surface-level character writing and derivative nature of the plot are in such close interaction with the face of Andriy. But speaking of that face, one shouldn't suppose to analyze this sci-fi downer without a mention of its visual idioms and how they frame the actor at the center of the storm. Though a tad televisual in composition during the first act, the cinematography by Nikita Kuzmenko does beautiful things with the possibilities of outer-space light. It further captures the human visage as the greatest landscape of all and knows when to take a step back from motivated sources for a spark of wonder, the shadow of nightmares crawling out of the imagination and the glory of love materialized.
In a similar style to Else, U Are the Universe feels like a pandemic movie using the sci-fi device to process the feelings of cloistering in isolation as the world around crumbles. Or of exile from a land overtaken by fire and fury, bloodshed and invasion. Like it happens in most genre filmmaking, the fantastic is the path by which one confronts the world beyond fantasy, an oblique way of looking in the mirror. In both cases, the filmmakers have arrived at one absolute truth that defines the human condition within their narratives - we are each other's universe. In this life, other people are all there is. They are our reason to live. They are the reason we may one day die with a peaceful smile, content at the end of everything.
Else and U Are the Universe are still looking for distribution. At TIFF, Emin's body horror love story was in Midnight Madness, while Ostrikov's sci-fi bowed in the festival's Discovery section.