“A glitch in the matrix”: Film review | Sundance 2021

“Room 237” director Rodney Ascher follows the rabbit hole of simulation theory in his latest documentary.

After three feature-length documentaries, Rodney Ascher has certainly found his niche. In his The brillianttheme Room 237,The nightmare, about those who suffer from sleep paralysis, and its new A glitch in the matrix, he eagerly pushes non-fictional conventions to the border of identification with sometimes disturbed interviewees, exploring ideas that lurk in their heads and can destroy or at least transform their lives.

This time around, it’s simulation theory, the idea that everything around us is an illusion, made (probably with ultra-advanced computers) by a creator who is not this capital-C creator. to which they pray in church. The idea is more compelling with each passing year, but Ascher goes back to explore its origins as far as Plato’s cave, but with particular attention to the paranoid genius of Philip K. Dick. While it leaves some avenues under-explored and pays a little too much attention to the verified sci-fi landmark name in its title, the film is gripping, sometimes disturbing. And it is perhaps the only image this year that would be less effective in a Park City theater than in this virtual festival ideally watched by a single audience, in a curtained room where noon is indistinguishable from 3 am, connected to a “real” world almost forgotten only by a data cable and deliveries made by anonymous servants of the Internet. Look at it for yourself, and it might sound like a message from an invisible realm, sent by beings who have been freed from a false reality and want to take you with them.

As usual, Ascher prioritizes speaking to those in the throes of an idea, even when a more mainstream documentary maker might want to validate his views with the help of presumably objective outsiders. Although we meet academics and cultural journalists here, the film is owned by four “eyewitnesses” who have lived much of their lives believing the world to be some kind of simulation. Each man is seen sitting in front of a webcam, his face and torso transformed into a video game avatar by motion capture animation. (A fifth “eyewitness” is heard but not seen: Joshua Cooke, whose mind has been so distorted by a The matrix obsession that he shot and killed both parents.)

Each came to their beliefs in a different way either through a child’s view of a strange adult world, for example, or by following certain types of daily coincidences and finding patterns that seemed meaningful. Their different backgrounds and insights into the nature of our manufactured world hint at a diversity of ideas the film can’t hope to contain: are there any vast, Matrix-like the field of sleeping humans whose lives are nothing but computer-assisted dreams, or are we just lines of code like a meteorologist’s weather simulation? Is the simulated world a vast network of independent artificial intelligences, or am I the only sensitive being in the simulation, surrounded by “non-player characters” whose design is complex enough only to simulate intelligence and in the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, not even that? (Ascher, you’re warned: if your next movie attempts to humanize QAnon, I’m not reviewing it.)

Likewise, the possible reasons and ramifications for a simulated reality are too numerous to explore here. Are we the creations of a very advanced “posthuman” race that tries to understand their ancestors by recreating human history? Are our actions used to test the impact of proposed social policies in a real world that is not very different from ours? Are we just some kind of Truman Show entertainment for our invisible programmers?

And if everything around us is just ones and zeros in a big hard drive somewhere, does that matter if I take guns and I’m full? Grand Theft Auto, just to see what it feels like? The film shows how Matrix– style mythologies in which only you think you see the world for what it really is are the thought that leads to high school massacres.

The ideas thrown out are heady enough even to entertain a viewer who doesn’t take them seriously. But Ascher’s visual effects team amplifies them considerably, especially when it illustrates Cooke’s tragic experience. They turn the house he shared with his parents into a distorted computer illustration, like the result of a processor or a brain trying to make sense of corrupted data.

Then there’s Mr. Dick, who risked humiliation in 1977, sitting in front of an audience in France and admitting that he believed the world was a computer simulation. Three years earlier, after receiving medication for oral surgery, he experienced a strange revelation; he began to sense the existence of alternate versions of his own reality. He struggled to make sense of these hunches for years, and Glitch often comes back to his speech. His mad prophet visions counterbalance more sober interviews with Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose academic work helped simulation theory find its way into mainstream conversations.

Bostrom uses the plain language of logic to guess the odds that we are not in what believers call “basic reality”, but in one of the countless simulations its inhabitants have programmed. Elsewhere in the world of ideas, more staunch thinkers are complaining: if it is impossible to know for sure, and impossible to know the nature of any other more real world that might exist beyond our own, and there is nothing you could do. to do if you knew, what is the point of asking yourself questions about it?

Location: Sundance Film Festival (midnight)
Production company: Campfire
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures (Available Friday February 5 in theaters and on demand)
Managing Editor: Rodney Ascher
Producer: Ross M. Dinerstein
Executive Producers: Colin Frederick, Rodney Ascher, Ross Girard, David Carrico, Adam Paulsen
Composer: Jonathan Snipes

108 minutes