KLARA AND THE SUN in theatres this weekend

Jenna Ortega plays Klara  TRAILER

 

The Beautiful Strangeness of Klara and the Sun

Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is an imperfect, occasionally bewildering fable about artificial intelligence, human vulnerability, and the curious persistence of hope. Its very oddness is part of its appeal.

There is something endearingly peculiar about Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, a film that seems to have wandered into the wrong future and decided to make itself comfortable. Its world is too picturesque for its tragedies, its artificial intelligence too guileless for its philosophical ambitions, and its emotions too conspicuously arranged to pass for the difficult, private business of being human. Yet I found myself enjoying it, sometimes in spite of its shortcomings and sometimes because of them. With its pastel melancholy, retrofuturist furnishings, eccentric rhythms, and almost anime-like understanding of emotional expression, the film possesses an unusual visual personality that is difficult to dismiss. It may not penetrate the mysteries of consciousness with the precision its source material invites, but it approaches those mysteries with an openhearted strangeness of its own. I left less persuaded by its philosophy than charmed by its peculiar little universe.

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to accompany children, whose attentive, slightly disconcerting gaze becomes our principal means of encountering this altered society. When Josie, a seriously ill teenager played by Mia Tharia, selects Klara as her companion, the android enters a household where affection is inseparable from apprehension. Josie's mother, Chrissy, portrayed by Amy Adams, is struggling with the possibility of losing her daughter, while the family inhabits a future in which technological advancement has become both a promise of salvation and a mechanism of social exclusion. Klara observes everything with the solemn concentration of someone who has arrived on Earth without receiving the explanatory literature. Human gestures, passing expressions, and the mysterious behavior of sunlight acquire enormous significance in her developing understanding of existence. Ortega gives this peculiar consciousness a winning physical vocabulary: a held posture, an uncertain movement, a face whose openness seems almost to expose the machinery beneath it. There is a sweetness here, although the film occasionally mistakes sweetness for depth.

The distinction matters because Ishiguro's novel, published in 2021, is a considerably more restrained and unsettling proposition. Like Never Let Me Go, it allows its speculative premise to unfold through a consciousness that cannot entirely comprehend the world it inhabits. Klara's limitations are essential to the novel's achievement. She observes human beings with extraordinary attentiveness, yet her interpretations remain partial, leaving readers to recognize the emotional realities she cannot fully articulate. Her faith in the sun as a benevolent, sustaining presence gives the narrative a delicate spiritual dimension without resolving its uncertainties. What does it mean to possess consciousness? Does love depend upon the nature of the person who gives it, or upon the needs of the person who receives it? And if a machine can become indispensable to someone who suffers, does its artificial origin ultimately matter? Waititi's film raises these questions, but it is less interested in allowing them to linger. It prefers to make them visible, colorful, and occasionally funny. The difference is not insignificant. Still, a film need not reproduce the intellectual temperature of a novel to justify its existence.

Waititi's particular sensibility is immediately recognizable. The director of Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople has often found comedy in the awkward behavior of people who have no adequate language for their pain. His humor can make vulnerability bearable, exposing the absurdity that coexists with sorrow. In Klara and the Sun, however, the balance is less assured. The opening scenes, featuring android companions displayed for prospective buyers, flirt with retail satire and the peculiar comedy of manufactured innocence. Natasha Lyonne, presiding over the proceedings with her characteristically tart eccentricity, seems to have arrived from a more mischievous movie. Klara's unusual movements and literal-minded observations likewise invite amusement. But as Josie's illness assumes greater importance, the film shifts toward domestic melodrama, and the tonal transition can feel abrupt, as though somebody had changed the channel without changing the scenery. The comedy does not always deepen the sorrow that follows it. Sometimes it merely sits beside it, waiting for its turn to speak.

Visually, though, the film has an undeniable appeal. Its future looks strangely nostalgic, as if technological progress had taken place inside a memory of the mid-twentieth century. Warm golds, carefully composed interiors, and objects that seem to belong to several different historical periods give the setting the quality of an illustrated fable. The cinematography favors a softened, luminous atmosphere, while the production design imagines a civilization that has advanced technologically without relinquishing its affection for the tangible and familiar. This is not the cold, metallic dystopia that speculative cinema so often supplies. It is a future with the slightly artificial charm of a dollhouse, beautiful enough to inhabit and strange enough to distrust. At times, I was reminded more of anime than of conventional live-action science fiction: not necessarily in any literal stylistic correspondence, but in the willingness to let a heightened visual world carry emotions that ordinary realism might leave unexpressed. The result can be twee, even absurd. It can also be lovely. The film's artificiality becomes part of its imaginative signature.

Beneath these attractive surfaces lies a darker social arrangement that the screenplay never quite develops. Genetic enhancement appears to offer privileged children a competitive advantage, while those excluded from such interventions risk becoming increasingly irrelevant. Artificial companions occupy an equally ambiguous position, serving as commercial products while assuming roles that families once expected human relationships to fulfill. Josie's illness brings these larger anxieties into intimate focus. Her mother's desperation is understandable precisely because it is so difficult to separate from love: how far might a parent go to preserve a child, and at what point does the desire to defeat mortality become a refusal to recognize another person's vulnerability? Adams conveys flashes of this terrible emotional arithmetic, suggesting a woman whose composure is an increasingly fragile defense against catastrophe. Yet the screenplay gives her too little psychological space. The social consequences of enhancement remain sketchy, and the ethical questions surrounding Josie's future are introduced more clearly than they are examined. The film gestures toward a world transformed by technological inequality without making that transformation sufficiently tangible.

Adams nevertheless lends the domestic drama a seriousness that the surrounding material sometimes struggles to sustain. Her restrained expressions suggest fears that the dialogue cannot adequately contain, and her performance gives Chrissy an emotional weight beyond the character's occasionally schematic construction. Tharia, meanwhile, brings Josie a believable mixture of reserve and vulnerability, although the film too often positions her as the embodiment of an ethical dilemma rather than as a teenager with a fully independent inner life. Ortega remains the film's most intriguing presence. Her Klara is earnest without being entirely innocent, observant without being conventionally perceptive. The difficulty is that the screenplay repeatedly converts her unfamiliarity with human behavior into a source of charm, leaving insufficient room for the strangeness to become genuinely unsettling. Klara is supposed to illuminate the people around her, but she is also an intelligence whose consciousness should resist our complete understanding. The film makes her likable before it makes her mysterious.

This limitation becomes especially apparent when Klara's memory begins to deteriorate. Here, the story approaches one of its most affecting possibilities: the idea that a being assembled from observation might lose the very experiences through which it has constructed an identity. For a human being, memory is already an unreliable architecture, subject to revision, omission, and the consolations of self-invention. For an artificial consciousness, its failure raises an additional question: if the accumulated record of experience disappears, what remains of the person who experienced it? The film's visual glitches communicate malfunction, but not always the intimate terror of an existence coming apart from within. Nevertheless, the premise has a quiet emotional force. Klara's vulnerability invites us to contemplate our own dependence on the fragile continuity of memory, and the possibility that personhood may be less a stable possession than something continually reconstructed. The film comes closest to philosophical seriousness when it stops trying to explain its android and allows her fragility to speak for itself.

There is, finally, something touching about the film's insistence that hope need not be intellectually sophisticated to be emotionally consequential. Klara believes in the sun. She believes that careful observation and purposeful action might make a difference to someone she loves. Her understanding of the universe is incomplete, perhaps even naïve, but then so is much of the human behavior surrounding her. The people who consider themselves more sophisticated are hardly free of magical thinking: they invest their hopes in medical interventions, technological solutions, and the fantasy that sufficient determination can make loss negotiable. Klara's faith may be sentimentalized, but it also exposes the desperation beneath ostensibly rational forms of belief. The film never fully resolves this parallel, and its score sometimes insists upon feelings that would have been more powerful left unannounced. Yet its emotional generosity has a sincerity that I found difficult to resent. There is a difference between a work that simplifies suffering because it cannot imagine its complexity and one that simplifies it because it longs, perhaps too earnestly, to offer consolation. Waititi's film wavers between the two.

Klara and the Sun is not the profound meditation on artificial consciousness that its premise promises, nor does it achieve the quiet devastation that Ishiguro's approach to human fragility might lead one to expect. Its ideas are underdeveloped, its tonal shifts occasionally awkward, and its emotional cues too often underlined in musical ink. But its imperfections do not cancel its pleasures. I admired its peculiar beauty, its retrofuturist dreaminess, its willingness to be a little ridiculous, and Ortega's delicate attempt to embody a being caught between mechanical construction and emotional possibility. The film sometimes resembles an elaborate toy whose hidden mechanisms remain visible, but there is pleasure in watching it move, and even a certain tenderness in its clumsiness. Perhaps its most revealing contradiction is that a story about the limits of artificial feeling should itself feel so visibly manufactured. I would have welcomed greater ambiguity, greater psychological depth, and more confidence in silence. I would also, quite happily, return to its strange, sunlit world. A film can fall short of greatness and still possess a soul of sorts. This one, imperfectly and unexpectedly, does.

LENA GHIO   

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The Intimacy of Looking: Ciel Variable #133 and the Politics of Being Seen / L'intimité du regard : Ciel variable #133 et la politique du regard

TO ORDER / POUR COMMANDER

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In its Fall 2026 issue, Ciel Variable turns to intimacy not as a refuge from public life, but as a contested space where bodies, memories, and histories negotiate the terms of their visibility.

There is a peculiar loneliness to an age in which almost everything can be made visible. We offer our faces to cameras, convert private feeling into public evidence, and mistake the circulation of images for the achievement of understanding. Yet visibility is not the same as recognition, and proximity does not guarantee intimacy. Against this confusion, the Montreal-based contemporary photography magazine Ciel variable, in its 133rd issue, Intimacies, proposes a more demanding proposition: that to look closely at another person, or even at the remnants of a life, is to assume a responsibility that cannot be discharged by looking alone.

Bringing together Maude Arsenault, Judith Bellavance, and Nicole Jolicœur, the issue approaches intimacy through the vulnerable body, the persistence of loss, and the historical construction of psychological suffering. These are not merely adjacent subjects. They expose a common problem: the distance between a person’s lived experience and the images through which that experience becomes intelligible to others. Photography occupies this distance uneasily. It can preserve what time threatens to erase, but it can also reduce a human being to a specimen, an appearance, or an interpretation. The achievement of Intimacies lies in its willingness to inhabit that contradiction rather than resolve it prematurely.

Arsenault’s practice, informed by decades of exploration into representations of women’s bodies and the spaces they inhabit, makes vulnerability a question of agency. Her photobooks Entangled and Resurfacing suggest, even in their titles, the tension between being caught within the structures that shape identity and recovering the capacity to inhabit oneself differently. The body here is neither an uncomplicated site of authenticity nor a passive object awaiting interpretation. It is a surface on which culture, desire, memory, and self-perception converge. To photograph it attentively is to confront the unstable boundary between exposure and self-possession. In a visual culture that rewards instant legibility, such work insists that a body may be seen without being fully explained.

Judith Bellavance approaches the same existential uncertainty by another route: the material afterlife of ordinary things. Her collections of objects and images—porcelain, insects, fragments of the natural world, traces left upon the body—form an intimate archive in which the insignificant becomes charged with consequence. A mark on the skin or an object displaced from its original purpose can become evidence of an encounter that has already vanished. Bellavance’s interest in the threshold between document and fiction is especially compelling because memory itself operates there. We do not retrieve the past intact; we reconstruct it from partial impressions, emotional residues, and things whose meanings change as we do.

Her engagement with thanatology, alongside her work in the funeral profession, lends this inquiry an unusual gravity. Death is not simply an ending to be represented but a transformation in the conditions of presence. What remains of a person is distributed among objects, gestures, stories, and the imaginations of survivors. Bellavance’s material sensibility suggests that mourning begins not when we discover a perfect substitute for the absent, but when we learn to recognize the strange eloquence of what cannot replace them. Her photographs invite us to consider how matter becomes memory without pretending that memory can overcome loss.

If Arsenault examines the vulnerable body and Bellavance the material traces of disappearance, Nicole Jolicœur turns toward the institutional gaze that has historically claimed authority over both. In Traité d’hypocondrie, situated within a practice informed by the history of psychiatry, Jolicœur revisits the visual and intellectual traditions through which women’s psychological suffering has been classified and represented. Her sustained engagement with Jean-Martin Charcot’s theories of female hysteria raises questions that extend far beyond nineteenth-century medicine: who is permitted to describe distress, whose testimony is believed, and when does the act of observation become a mechanism of control?

The archive, in this context, is not an innocent repository of facts. Images inherit the assumptions of the institutions that produced them, and their apparent authority can conceal the violence of categorization. By bringing image, text, and the performative dimensions of voice into dialogue, Jolicœur’s practice opens historical representations to scrutiny. The person once rendered an object of medical knowledge may emerge as a subject whose experience exceeds the terms imposed upon it. This is not a simple reversal in which the old gaze is replaced by a morally flawless new one. It is a more difficult act of criticism: exposing how power enters representation, and how its traces persist even when the original theories have lost their legitimacy.

What gives this thematic constellation its contemporary urgency is the culture in which it appears. Digital platforms have made self-representation ubiquitous while concentrating the power to classify, rank, and circulate images in systems largely indifferent to the complexity of individual lives. At the same time, public discourse increasingly demands that suffering become immediately legible: documented, diagnosed, narrated, and displayed. Intimacies offers a counter pressure. Its artists suggest that ethical attention requires more than access to another person’s image. It requires an awareness of what the image withholds, what its history distorts, and what no act of looking can claim to possess.

The issue’s critical ambition is also its potential limitation. Three substantial artistic practices, each capable of sustaining an entire inquiry, risk becoming too neatly aligned under a single thematic heading. Intimacy can encompass eroticism, kinship, estrangement, tenderness, and complicity; its breadth may blur distinctions as readily as it illuminates them. Yet the strongest work resists thematic uniformity. Arsenault’s embodied inquiry, Bellavance’s meditation on material remnants, and Jolicœur’s institutional critique do not offer interchangeable versions of vulnerability. Their differences reveal intimacy as a relationship shaped by unequal powers, incompatible memories, and the persistent possibility of misunderstanding.

As a bilingual publication devoted to photography’s encounter with contemporary art and global culture, Ciel variable also sustains an important alternative to the accelerated consumption of images. Its essays, portfolios, exhibition criticism, and attention to artistic process create room for photography to be considered rather than merely encountered. This editorial commitment matters. Critical writing cannot restore every complexity an image loses in circulation, but it can teach us to recognize that loss—and to look again with greater care.

Ultimately, Intimacies is less concerned with bringing us closer to others than with questioning what closeness demands. Its deepest insight is that attention becomes meaningful only when it relinquishes the fantasy of complete understanding. The body remains partly unknowable; the dead exceed their surviving objects; the historically scrutinized subject cannot be recovered simply by correcting the archive. These are not failures of representation so much as reminders of the limits that make genuine regard possible.

In a world that increasingly treats visibility as proof of truth, Ciel variable proposes a quieter and more exacting ethic: to see without claiming ownership, to remember without pretending to restore, and to approach another life without reducing its mystery to an explanation. Intimacy, in this sense, is not the end of distance. It is the willingness to remain answerable across it. That may be photography’s most enduring promise—not that an image can abolish our separateness, but that, at its best, it can teach us how to meet one another without denying it.

LENA GHIO   

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The Architecture of What Remains: Chiharu Shiota’s The Soul Trembles

Installation In Silence (2002/2026) detail. Chiharu Shiota's patient weaving with threads creates extraordinary visions that evoke at once our connections to each other and memory. This photo of her complex installation looks like an antique print. 
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Entering Chiharu Shiota’s The Soul Trembles is to enter a world after the departure of its inhabitants, though their absence has somehow become the room’s most palpable presence. Threads gather in the air like cobwebs in an abandoned house; dresses, chairs, shoes, and other ordinary objects persist as mute witnesses to lives no longer accessible. Yet this is not the desolation of a place emptied by time. It is the strange fullness of a place that remembers. At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where the exhibition opens its first North American presentation in autumn 2026, Shiota proposes an unsettling reversal: perhaps absence is not what remains when presence disappears, but the material through which presence continues to exist.

Spanning more than three decades of the Japanese artist’s practice, the exhibition, organized by the MMFA and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, gathers monumental thread installations, sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs, and documentation of her work for theatre, dance, and opera. Curated by Mami Kataoka, with Iris Amizlev overseeing the Montreal presentation, the survey traces an artistic life devoted to making the invisible apprehensible. Its central achievement, however, lies beyond retrospective completeness. Shiota’s work transforms the gallery into an anatomy of memory, where the architecture of a life is measured not by what can be recovered, but by what continues to exert pressure after it has gone.

Thread is her instrument of this paradox. Stretched, crossed, knotted, and accumulated, it converts empty space into something almost bodily. A single strand is fragile, incapable of sustaining much weight; thousands, interwoven, become an encompassing structure that can seem at once protective and imprisoning. The material carries no intrinsic narrative. Its meanings emerge through density, colour, and the objects it envelops. Black thread can suggest night, handwriting, or the impenetrable intricacy of the unconscious. Red invokes blood and attachment, the invisible continuity between bodies. White, associated with funerals in Japan, holds death and renewal in the same suspended breath. Colour becomes less a symbolic code than a condition of feeling.

A sample of how Chiharu Shiota has worked with the theatre.

The installations are drawn by hand, in situ, through repetitive gestures that Shiota has described as meditative. This labour matters. The apparent intricacy of the finished structures can obscure the individual actions from which they emerge: one thread laid across another, a knot tightened, a line extended into uncertain space. Their scale suggests an impersonal cosmic order, yet their construction remains intimate and fallible. Every strand records a decision; every intersection proposes a relationship. The resulting webs resemble maps whose destinations have vanished, leaving only the routes by which someone might once have reached them. Shiota’s art makes navigation itself an existential condition.

This understanding of space grew from a dissatisfaction with painting. Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota initially imagined herself becoming a painter, but found that paint no longer offered an adequate expression of her identity. In 1994, during her studies in Australia, she performed Becoming Painting, covering her body with canvas and red enamel. The work was an act of liberation, an attempt to move beyond the polished object into an art made through physical exposure. After moving to Berlin in 1996, she studied with Marina Abramović, deepening her engagement with performance before turning toward a problem that would define her subsequent practice: how might an artwork retain the human presence without requiring the body itself?

Her answer was to make objects carry the burden of embodiment. A used suitcase contains more than its physical capacity; it implies departure, a destination, and the private arrangements of a journey. A dress preserves the contours of an absent wearer without disclosing who that person was. A chair suggests the posture of someone who once occupied it. These objects are neither illustrations of memory nor relics in any straightforward sense. They are instruments of inference, prompting the mind to construct an invisible person around a tangible remainder. By surrounding them with thread, Shiota gives this process material form. The web does not explain the absent life. It reveals how insistently we try to imagine it.

Connecting small memories detail, mixed media, Chiharu Shiota 2019/2026

In In Silence (2002/2026), this impulse assumes the gravity of an elegy. A charred piano and chairs occupy a room thick with black thread, their damaged surfaces emerging from a darkness that seems to have consumed the air itself. The installation originates in a childhood memory: when Shiota was nine, a neighbouring house burned, leaving a scorched piano outside. Though the instrument could no longer produce music, its beauty appeared to her more intense after the fire. The apparent contradiction is the work’s emotional centre. Destruction has not merely diminished the object; it has altered the terms under which it can be seen. What survives bears the event within it.

The piano’s silence is therefore not an absence of sound alone. It is the persistence of sound as expectation, a music that can no longer happen but has not entirely disappeared. The black web seems to give this impossibility a body, binding the ruined instrument to a space in which loss becomes almost architectural. Shiota does not sentimentalize damage by suggesting that suffering necessarily makes things beautiful. Rather, she attends to the terrible transformation through which an object becomes inseparable from what happened to it. The piano remains, but it can never again be only a piano.

Rebirth and Passing detail, mixed media, Chiharu Shiota 2019

The question of bodily survival becomes more explicit in Out of My Body (2019), where suspended red leather, cut into a netlike form, hangs above bronze casts of the artist’s limbs. The material evokes torn skin, while the separated casts suggest a body rendered into components. Shiota’s second cancer diagnosis, in 2017, brought her into direct confrontation with mortality and the unsettling distance between physical existence and the soul. Here, the body appears less as a unified self than as something vulnerable to disassembly, medical procedure, and the frightening impersonality of treatment. The red network holds together what the sculpture seems to have pulled apart. Its connections offer no easy reassurance: the body can be fragmented, yet the experience of being a body exceeds any inventory of its parts.

In this light, Uncertain Journey (2016/2026) expands the question of individual survival into a collective predicament. Red threads stream through the gallery, attaching themselves to metal boats suspended within the dense web. Visitors move beneath and around the installation, entering a structure that changes perceptually with every shift in position. The boats suggest migration, displacement, and the passage of a life toward an unknowable future. But the threads complicate the image of travel. They make each vessel part of a larger system of attachments, as though no journey could ever be entirely solitary, even when its destination remains unknown.

The work’s emotional force depends on this tension between connection and uncertainty. The web binds, but it does not direct; it offers neither a secure route nor a privileged vantage point. To walk through it is to inhabit a condition shared by strangers, each carrying a private history through a space shaped by countless others. The installation does not erase differences between individual journeys. Instead, it makes visible the precarious fact of interdependence: our lives intersect in ways we cannot fully perceive, and our futures remain entangled even when we cannot agree on where we are going.

Chiharu Shiota on the left with Iris Amizlev, Curator of Special Projects at the MMFA on the right.

The exhibition’s repeated reconstruction reinforces this idea. Although The Soul Trembles has travelled internationally since its premiere in Tokyo in 2019, its major installations must be rebuilt for each new site. Shiota visits the space and reimagines the work according to its dimensions, allowing the structure to become wider, narrower, higher, or otherwise transformed. The installation is never simply transported intact. It is made again. This process turns impermanence from a theme into a method: the work survives by accepting change, retaining its identity not through perfect repetition but through renewed acts of creation.

That principle also defines the exhibition’s relationship with its audience. Shiota’s personal experiences provide the work’s point of departure, but they do not dictate its final meaning. A visitor may encounter the boats through the experience of migration, the charred piano through grief, or the suspended threads through an entirely private memory that has no obvious equivalent in the artist’s biography. Such openness is not vagueness. It is the precise condition that allows an individual history to become shareable without becoming universalized into sameness.

What trembles, finally, is not the soul as some separable essence waiting to be represented. It is the fragile continuity between what we have lost and what we are still capable of feeling. Shiota’s threads give that continuity a form: delicate enough to suggest its vulnerability, extensive enough to reveal its reach. Her installations do not promise that memory will preserve us intact, or that death can be made intelligible through art. They offer something more modest and more profound. The departed remain neither fully present nor wholly gone; they persist in the objects they touched, the spaces they altered, and the connections that outlive their makers. In Shiota’s haunted architecture, absence becomes a way of holding on—not by preventing disappearance, but by giving its consequences somewhere to live.

ref: https://www.artasiapacific.com/people/essential-works-of-chiharu-shiota/

Until February 14, 2027 // Chiharu Shiota The Soul Trembles

LENA GHIO   

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Herman Yau’s We’re Nothing at All and the Fractured Conscience of Hong Kong

TRAILER 

There are films that announce their intentions through spectacle, and others that disclose their true preoccupations only after the spectacle has subsided. Herman Yau’s We’re Nothing at All (不赦之罪) belongs, uneasily and compellingly, to the latter category. Initially, its premise promised the familiar satisfactions of a procedural investigation: a catastrophic crime, a forensic specialist summoned from retirement, a trail of evidence, and the gradual reconstruction of a mystery. Yet the film soon abandons the reassuring geometry of the detective story. What begins with an explosion on a double-decker bus becomes an inquiry into the social conditions under which human beings are rendered disposable. The central question is no longer simply who committed the crime, or why, but what kind of society makes catastrophe imaginable as an answer to suffering. In Yau’s vision of Hong Kong, the investigation penetrates not merely the circumstances of a bombing but the moral architecture of a city whose prosperity conceals profound inequalities.

The opening disaster, inspired by the 1998 Wuhan bus bombing, establishes a narrative of dislocation that Yau subsequently unfolds along two intersecting trajectories. Lung Sir, played with restrained authority by Patrick Tam, is a disgraced forensic expert recalled to investigate the explosion. His professional discipline provides the film with its procedural framework: bodies must be examined, images scrutinised, discrepancies reconciled. But the evidence leads beyond the reassuringly impersonal world of forensic science, towards the lives of Fai and Ike, a young gay couple whose histories of economic precarity, familial rejection and social exclusion culminate in an act of devastating violence. Their story, reconstructed through flashbacks, gradually unsettles the conventions of the investigation. Each clue becomes a fragment of lived experience; each revelation exposes the inadequacy of explanations that isolate criminal acts from the circumstances surrounding them. Yau’s central formal ambition is to make these two narratives illuminate one another, transforming the detective’s search for causality into an examination of collective responsibility.

This ambition acquires its force from the film’s unmistakably local specificity. Although the originating incident occurred in mainland China, We’re Nothing at All is fundamentally concerned with contemporary Hong Kong: its cramped domestic arrangements, its conspicuous social stratification, its persistent prejudices and its increasingly strained relationship with the promise of urban prosperity. Fai’s residence in a subdivided unit is particularly telling. Such spaces are more than expressions of inadequate housing; they materialise a social order in which privacy, security and personal dignity become privileges distributed according to economic means. The city’s vertical grandeur, so often celebrated in cinema, acquires a less flattering significance when set against the compressed interiors inhabited by those unable to participate fully in its prosperity. Yau understands that inequality is experienced not only through income but through space: through the number of people sharing a room, the absence of a refuge, and the humiliating knowledge that even the most elementary forms of comfort remain beyond reach. The film’s social landscape is therefore not incidental to its tragedy. It is among the tragedy’s principal authors.

Yau’s career makes this preoccupation unsurprising. A filmmaker whose work ranges from the transgressive extremity of The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome to the socially observant dramas Whispers and Moans and True Women for Sale, he has consistently demonstrated an appetite for subjects respectable cinema might prefer to leave undisturbed. His background in Cultural Studies lends an additional dimension to this trajectory, although intellectual credentials alone cannot guarantee artistic insight. In We’re Nothing at All, his characteristic willingness to confront the grotesque becomes a means of puncturing social decorum. The film’s graphic violence and sexual explicitness are not separable from its wider sensibility: Yau wants to expose what polite public discourse conceals, whether bodily degradation, institutional indifference or the intimate cruelty of prejudice. His cinema can be abrasive, even blunt, but its abrasiveness has a purpose. Beneath the sensational surface lies an insistence that the marginalised should not disappear simply because their existence inconveniences the stories a society prefers to tell about itself.

The relationship between Fai and Ike, however, reveals both the urgency and the limitations of this approach. Their intimacy is rendered in warm, golden hues that contrast sharply with the colder visual atmosphere surrounding Lung’s investigation. The distinction gives the film some of its most affecting images: tenderness appears as a fragile enclave within a world organised around surveillance, judgement and exclusion. Yet the visual delicacy of these passages is not consistently matched by psychological depth. We learn more about the hostility directed at the couple than about the private language through which their relationship develops. Their sexuality becomes legible principally through rejection, while their love is asked to signify the injuries inflicted by a prejudiced society. The result is a troubling paradox. Yau grants marginalised characters narrative centrality, but does not always grant them equivalent interiority. Fai and Ike are indispensable to the film’s argument, yet sometimes seem insufficiently realised as individuals whose desires, contradictions and ordinary affections might exceed that argument. Their suffering is vividly established; their lives before suffering becomes destiny remain frustratingly indistinct.

This imbalance complicates the film’s political effectiveness. Yau is alert to the hypocrisies of public life, including the gap between official campaigns promoting urban vitality and the material conditions confronting those expected to participate in it. Brief moments of political satire suggest a city in which administrative optimism has become increasingly estranged from ordinary experience. Nevertheless, the film’s social observations occasionally arrive with the bluntness of an indictment whose verdict precedes its evidence. Poverty, homophobia and institutional failure are all persuasively identified as pressures, but they are not always explored with the patience necessary to reveal how those pressures differ in kind, intensity and consequence. Queer experience, in particular, risks becoming an emblem of social exclusion rather than a fully inhabited reality. The distinction matters: representation is not achieved simply by placing marginalised people at the centre of a narrative. It requires attention to the specific textures of their existence, to what they cherish as well as what they endure.

The film’s most consequential difficulty emerges in its attempt to establish a moral correspondence between the young couple and Lung. As the investigation develops, the retired specialist’s own crisis brings him into unsettling proximity with the despair that has overtaken Fai and Ike. Yau appears to suggest that the distance between ordinary respectability and catastrophic desperation may be narrower than society cares to acknowledge. This is a recognisably humanist impulse, and Patrick Tam gives it considerable weight. Lung is neither an infallible investigator nor a convenient symbol of institutional virtue; his vulnerability gradually reveals the person concealed beneath professional authority. The affection of his wife, the decency of his assistant Raymond, and the quiet loyalty of Ike’s sister offer counterweights to the film’s pervasive bleakness. These relationships suggest that compassion survives even where social structures fail, and that goodness need not announce itself grandly to become consequential.

Yet the comparison between Lung and the two young men also threatens to flatten the very inequalities the film has worked so hard to expose. Despair may indeed arrive suddenly, but its consequences are shaped by the resources available to those who experience it. A middle-class man with a supportive family occupies a fundamentally different position from two economically vulnerable gay men whose homes have become sites of rejection. To place their crises within a universal account of human frailty risks confusing emotional resemblance with social equivalence. The film’s insistence on our shared capacity for suffering is humane; its implication that this suffering can be understood without sufficient attention to material circumstances is less convincing. Here, Yau’s compassion becomes a double-edged instrument: it broadens the film’s moral horizon while softening the structural critique that gives the story its greatest urgency.

Ultimately, We’re Nothing at All is more compelling as an act of social conscience than as a fully integrated work of drama. Its procedural machinery, political observations, queer romance and humanist resolution do not always cohere, and its characters sometimes bear the burden of ideas they have not been allowed enough space to complicate. Yet its imperfections should not obscure the seriousness of its undertaking. Hong Kong cinema has repeatedly demonstrated that intimate lives can reveal the pressures of an entire society, from Ann Hui’s attentive domestic realism to Ray Yeung’s explorations of queer ageing and belonging. Yau approaches this tradition from a rougher, more confrontational direction, favouring rupture over quiet observation, but shares its conviction that the personal is never entirely private. His film leaves behind a disturbing question about the distance between seeing suffering and understanding it. An investigation may establish the sequence of events, identify the perpetrators and reconstruct the final moments of the dead. It cannot, by itself, explain the world that preceded them. We’re Nothing at All does not fully resolve that problem, but it recognises its terrible importance. Its deepest achievement lies in asking us to look beyond the explosion, towards the accumulated injuries that made its aftermath possible.

上方的翻译应用 •  Shàngfāng de fānyì yìngyòng

LENA GHIO   

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Astrological Analysis of Elon Musk’s Current Potential Role in Ukraine/Russia/US war

Image is AI generated

The current situation involving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky raises serious concerns about Elon Musk's financial security, legal exposure, personal independence, and reputational risk. Trump and Putin's stated intention to deprive Zelensky of assets creates circumstances that require careful scrutiny, particularly if another individual (Musk?) is expected to provide financial resources, business assistance, or practical support. The central concern is whether involvement in their objectives could expose that individual to disproportionate risks while primarily benefiting Trump and Putin.

Financially, the situation presents the possibility of losses, unexpected liabilities, and continuing obligations. Requests for money, guarantees, access to business assets, or participation in transactions could create commitments that extend beyond their original purpose. Without clear terms and a full understanding of the potential consequences, the Musk could bear significant costs without receiving corresponding benefits. Maintaining control over personal finances, business operations, and assets is therefore essential.

Legally, participation in a dispute concerning Ukraine's property could create serious complications if transactions are improper or their purpose is unclear. Signing documents, transferring funds, making representations, or facilitating the movement of assets without appropriate verification could expose participants to liability. The stated intention to deprive Zelensky of assets warrants particular caution, although the precise legal implications depend on the facts and the nature of any proposed actions. Independent legal advice is advisable before undertaking commitments that could affect ownership rights or legal responsibilities.

Reputationally, association with Trump and Putin could damage professional credibility. Their dispute with Zelensky is based on the leaders ambitions and  to allegations of misconduct. Even someone who did not initiate the conflict might face questions about their judgment, involvement, or integrity. Protecting one's reputation requires transparency, careful documentation, and a clear distinction between legitimate assistance and participation in questionable conduct.

The situation also raises concerns about independence and conflicting interests. Trump's strong allegiance to Putin may encourage decisions driven by personal loyalty rather than objective assessment. However, their shared priorities do not necessarily align with the interests of others involved. If Trump and Putin receive the principal benefits while another person supplies resources, assumes obligations, or accepts the consequences, the arrangement could create an unfair imbalance of risk and reward.

Zelensky's position must also be assessed independently. He should not automatically be treated as an adversary simply because Trump and Putin regard him as one. Allegations and suspicions should be distinguished from verified facts, and any concerns about his conduct should be evaluated objectively. Participation in unlawful efforts to deprive him of property, mislead him, intimidate him, or damage his reputation could have serious consequences.

The most prudent response is to maintain clear boundaries and avoid commitments until the facts, legality, responsibilities, and potential outcomes are understood. Relevant communications and financial records should be preserved, access to accounts and business assets protected, and independent professional advice obtained

Nota Bene: The above is a distilled astrological analysis of today’s transiting planets, viewed through the lens of what I see as Trump’s current betrayal of NATO allies, his failure to uphold responsibilities toward Ukraine, and the consequences of his actions for the American people.

This analysis is based solely on astrological interpretations and possibilities, not on claims of certainty. I do not know any of the individuals discussed personally, yet their decisions have far-reaching implications for our collective security and well-being.

I sincerely hope Elon Musk will reflect carefully on how he chooses to use his considerable resources and influence. Political decisions and actions can have devastating human consequences, and I believe the choices he has made in recent years have contributed to a climate in which hundreds of thousands of lives have been placed at risk. Such consequences should give us all pause. No one with this degree of influence should underestimate the human cost of their political choices—or the opportunity they still have to help reduce suffering and protect lives.

LENA GHIO   

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FNC 2026: Wild Horse Nine

 

FNC 2026 / Wild Horse Nine trailer

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Wild Horse Nine: At the End of the World, the Men Who Made It Worse

There are films that use a landscape as a backdrop, and films that discover in a landscape a way of thinking. Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, set partly on the remote, elemental terrain of Easter Island, belongs uneasily and magnificently to the latter category. The island’s volcanic contours, vast Pacific horizons, saturated colours, and monumental stone figures offer something more than visual splendour: they establish a geography of moral isolation, a place where the world’s political machinery seems impossibly distant and yet its consequences remain everywhere. Against this extraordinary setting, McDonagh stages an encounter between two American intelligence operatives who have spent their lives manipulating history and now find themselves unable to escape its accumulated wreckage. Featuring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell at their most compellingly combustible, the film is a dark comedy about complicity, mortality, male friendship, and the absurd human appetite for absolution. It is also a film of productive contradictions, whose visual poetry and extraordinary performances occasionally expose the limits of its own satirical imagination.

Set in 1973, in the shadow of the Chilean coup that would overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Wild Horse Nine follows two veteran CIA agents whose professional lives have been shaped by the discreet manufacture of political catastrophe. Chris Carlisle, played by Malkovich, is a dying operative whose terminal cancer, intermittent forgetfulness, and long-cultivated contempt for ordinary morality have begun to disturb the equilibrium of his cynicism. His companion, Lee Chesterfield, embodied by Rockwell with an affecting combination of patience and melancholy, is charged with keeping his increasingly indiscreet partner from revealing secrets that powerful men would prefer to leave buried. Their journey from Santiago to Easter Island is ostensibly a respite from espionage, but the farther they travel from the machinery of American power, the more insistently its moral consequences follow. McDonagh understands that geographical escape is not the same as spiritual departure. One can cross an ocean without ever leaving the country one has made of oneself.

The film’s central achievement is the relationship between its two protagonists, a friendship so deeply embedded in shared experience that neither man possesses the emotional vocabulary to acknowledge its tenderness. McDonagh has long been fascinated by men who communicate affection through provocation, cruelty, and elaborate verbal evasions; here, that familiar preoccupation acquires a more sombre dimension. Carlisle and Chesterfield have spent decades discussing the practicalities of killing without seriously interrogating the morality of the act. Their conversations turn upon the etiquette of assassination, the peculiarities of national character, the deficiencies of American cheese, and the theological absurdities that arise when men accustomed to dispensing death begin contemplating their own. Their humour is not a refuge from their history but one of its instruments. The joke allows them to approach the truth without having to remain in its presence for too long.

Malkovich gives Carlisle a performance of exquisite, unnerving precision. His delivery, with its extravagant enunciation and leisurely contempt, transforms even the most grotesque observations into miniature theatrical events. Beneath the character’s cultivated intellectual superiority, however, lies a man whose certainty has begun to fracture. His terminal illness has not made him virtuous; it has merely rendered the old arrangements between conscience and denial less dependable. He records his thoughts on a dictaphone, ostensibly preparing a memoir, while his recollections drift between geopolitical atrocities, private grievances, and eccentric meditations on moths. Once indifferent to the suffering of others, Carlisle has begun escorting insects outside rather than killing them. The gesture is absurdly small beside his history of violence, and McDonagh wisely allows it to remain so. Yet this new solicitude suggests the possibility that conscience may return not as a revelation but as an embarrassing, almost involuntary tenderness toward life.

Rockwell supplies the film’s essential counterweight. Where Malkovich makes cynicism theatrical, Rockwell makes it weary. His Lee is less flamboyantly nihilistic, more attentive to the emotional obligations that his partner has spent a lifetime evading. Their chemistry is remarkable precisely because it does not depend upon sentimentality. Lee’s exasperation contains devotion; his restraint conceals a grief he cannot quite formulate. He has been entrusted with Carlisle’s final wish, a request that forces their friendship into the uncomfortable territory where loyalty and moral responsibility cease to be interchangeable. Rockwell understands that the character’s deepest conflict is not simply whether to obey his companion, but whether love can remain love when it is asked to participate in another person’s destruction. Together, the actors make the film’s philosophical questions intimate, giving metaphysical weight to pauses, interruptions, and arguments that seem, on the surface, gloriously ridiculous.

Easter Island provides the film with its most arresting visual and symbolic resource. Its immense stone figures, the moai, stand as mute witnesses to histories that exceed the comprehension of passing visitors. The surrounding landscape, alternately austere and astonishingly vivid, offers a striking counterpoint to the cramped moral universe inhabited by McDonagh’s Americans. The men arrive expecting distance, perhaps even transcendence; instead, the island becomes a mirror in which their smallness is newly visible. Nature does not absolve them, and beauty offers no automatic consolation. The Pacific horizon may suggest infinity, but the past remains stubbornly human. In the film’s most resonant visual passages, the contrast between the island’s grandeur and the protagonists’ verbal pettiness produces an almost tragic irony: these men have participated in the remaking of nations, yet cannot settle the elementary questions of what they owe the dead, one another, or themselves.

McDonagh’s dialogue remains a formidable pleasure. His characters speak in barbed, digressive exchanges whose comic rhythms recall the theatre of Samuel Beckett, where language becomes both a defence against despair and evidence of its persistence. A conversation may wander through religion, race, American imperialism, or the culinary indignities of national identity before suddenly revealing a wound beneath the wit. Steve Buscemi, as the anxious intelligence superior attempting to contain the damage, adds another finely calibrated performance to the ensemble. The arrival of two young Chilean left-wing students, Monica and Alicia, introduces a generational contrast between those who still believe political conviction can change the world and those who have made careers out of ensuring that it does not. Yet the film gives these women comparatively little interior life, too often positioning them as instruments of male revelation rather than fully realised participants in the historical and moral drama. This imbalance diminishes the film’s perspective, particularly when its critique of power might have benefited from the voices of those most directly threatened by it.

More troubling is McDonagh’s treatment of the historical atrocities that underpin the narrative. The CIA’s involvement in efforts to undermine Allende’s government belongs to the documented history of American intervention in Latin America; the film’s references to other covert operations likewise invoke consequences that extend far beyond the private regrets of its fictional agents. McDonagh’s irreverence can illuminate the grotesque distance between bureaucratic language and human suffering, exposing how easily violence becomes a professional accomplishment. At other moments, however, his appetite for the perfectly sharpened punchline threatens to reduce historical catastrophe to an opportunity for mordant entertainment. The problem is not that political horror must be approached solemnly, but that comedy requires an awareness of where its moral weight falls. When the perpetrators receive the richest dialogue, the most complicated emotions, and the most generous opportunities for redemption, the victims risk becoming scenery in somebody else’s reckoning.

This tension prevents Wild Horse Nine from achieving the sustained tragicomic perfection of McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, though the comparison also clarifies what makes the newer film distinctive. Its ambitions are broader, its historical burden heavier, and its sympathies more compromised. McDonagh is drawn to the possibility that even terrible men might experience a final awakening, that a flicker of compassion might matter even when it cannot repair the damage already done. The idea is emotionally persuasive but ethically precarious. Redemption cannot mean that remorse erases responsibility, or that the dying conscience of a perpetrator matters more than the lives destroyed by his actions. The film is strongest when it leaves this contradiction unresolved, allowing its characters to search for grace without pretending they have earned it.

Ultimately, Wild Horse Nine is a beautiful, unsettling, imperfect film whose greatest pleasures emerge from the collision between extraordinary performances, an unforgettable landscape, and questions that refuse to yield comfortable answers. Malkovich and Rockwell lend genuine emotional substance to a friendship expressed almost entirely through insults, evasions, and shared complicity. Easter Island gives their journey a visual majesty that their private philosophies cannot diminish, while McDonagh’s mordant intelligence keeps mortality from becoming merely solemn. Yet the film’s final challenge is not whether its two men can find peace before death, but whether peace, for men like these, can ever be separated from the reckoning they have avoided. The island remains indifferent; the statues do not pronounce judgment. The ocean simply continues beyond the limits of vision. What remains is the uncomfortable possibility that a man may learn to spare a moth after helping to destroy lives, and that this small mercy can be both genuinely moving and grotesquely insufficient. In that contradiction lies the film’s deepest achievement: its recognition that the human desire for forgiveness is most compelling precisely when forgiveness is not ours to give.

The movie hits theatres this November 6.

LENA GHIO   

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