social media - FilmRoot

Mikhail Red is at this point a public figure in the scope of Filipino cinema against the world. His latest, Deleter—sub-technological mystery horror and 2022 Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture-winner—follows no tighter premise than the act of a haunted house’s outreach transformed into an office building’s Wi-Fi signal. Lyra (Nadine Lustre) works an outsourced job as a content moderator for a Facebook-esque website, constantly spending her few remaining sane hours wide-eyed against a computer screen, either passing or deleting through the gore, obscenities and disturbed cell phone clips that everyday citizens pick up, for innocent or malicious intention in equal.

Their task is to “handle data … not people,” as Lyra explains away for her friend Aileen (Louise delos Reyes), the only character of concrete stakes in the film. It makes sense – drag a role into the dark mentally, and the steps to embed them in darkness physically become smaller in turn.

The first act of Red’s modern thriller doesn’t seem to entirely know what to do with Lyra’s occupation anyhow, letting the scanned-through Internet play on its own tempo almost too seamlessly with the randomness of delight the Internet actually triggers. Most of her job, pre-dramatics, plays from a third-person angle as confusing, if not unintentionally humorous.

Not that Lyra’s view of social media is self-seriousness taken astray, more so that Red’s frame seems consistently imperfect, a beck and call to keep the digital world’s barrier into our own stable & threatening, but without the camerawork to persistently keep a hypnotized audience on the cusp of realism. Unlike recent postmodern breakthroughs, namely Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to World’s Fair, Deleter finds no rooted connection through the wiring, a sustained vibe of unrevealed horrors cut off by doldrums of meaningless white-collar task-mastering.

When the film’s final act is settled on its tracks veering toward the goalposts, the threatening aura of Red’s attempted sophisticated edge has whittled down a blunt stub. The last 30 minutes of Deleter, a repercussion of traumatic happenings that have surrounded Lyra’s life in the days prior, scurries into an oblique darkness – characters floating around the office building’s hallways to the willingness of intermittent red security lighting, every shot performed for set-placing without allowing the actors any presence within their own space. If actors are not given the occupied space to connect, life cut short via aerial camera becomes errant, death then in turn whimsical.

Seen at Cinemark Carson and XD

Do Not Expect Too Much for the End of the World

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World film difficulty Ranking: 4

Radu Jude is no stranger to controversy or satirizing contemporary society. His previous feature, the Golden Bear winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, took aim at sexism, nationalism, and consumerism with COVID-19 and sex as a backdrop. Before that, he highlighted his country’s hidden involvement in the holocaust in I Do Not Care if we Go Down in History as Barbarians. Both of these films packed a strong punch of humor and cynicism, but Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is his most potent critique of the world today and a movie that will define the 2020s for later generations.

From: Romania, Europe
Watch: IMDb, Just Watch
Next: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, No Bears, Sorry to Bother You

The Breakdown

Don’t expect Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to be an easy watch. Unless you’re familiar with Radu Jude’s recent films, you might be confused why this film keeps cutting to an old communist-era Romanian film about a female taxi driver or why we spend the majority of the central narrative literally stuck in traffic. Don’t expect a resolution from the side-narratives either. All of the threads might seem random but they all contribute to the bleak and cynical tapestry of the modern world that Radu Jude creates.

You might be thinking; “why would I want to watch a cynical tapestry of the modern world? The world is bleak enough right now.” To which we say; “fear not, you will have a guide in the madness.” Ilinca Manolache’s Angela is like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. She’ll show us the hellish signs of late-stage capitalism – wealth inequality, corporate indifference, virtue signalling – and fiercely confront them with her dark humor. She’s integral to Jude’s critique of modern life as her humor makes it digestible and more like a bad dream than a shameful reality.

You might also be thinking; “why does Jude keep cutting to an old Community-era Romanian film?” The film in question is Angela merge mai departe, shot during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s authoritarian rule. It follows a female taxi driver as she ferries a range of male passengers around the city. The film highlights the danger of being a woman – she’s caught eyeing a wrench to use as a potential defense against one passenger – and is on the receiving end of leering eyes of men on the street, which Jude intentionally shows in slow motion. But her experiences are not significantly different to that which modern Angela faces. By including this communist-era film within Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude forces us to compare the two eras. Ultimately, and depressingly, life under the dictatorship appears no worse than today. You might even interpret the 80s as better. For one, it’s shot in color vs. the monochrome of modernity so it looks warmer, and secondly 80s Angela is free from corporate exploitation.

Conclusion

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is an era defining film. It’s bleak tapestry of the modern world marks a new low-point in Romanian (and modern capitalist) society. Just like Dante’s Inferno, we’re guided with dark humor through the hell of modernity and left to ponder how we got here.