Orwell: 2+2=5 on MUBI

Orwell: 2+2=5 on MUBI  TRAILER

When 2+2 No Longer Equals 4: Orwell, Raoul Peck, and the Crisis of Reality

Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 arrives not as a documentary about a writer but as an intervention into a historical moment. It is a film haunted by the suspicion that George Orwell’s darkest fears were not warnings about some distant future but diagnoses of recurring tendencies within modern civilization itself. Watching Peck’s lucid and unsettling work, one is struck by a paradox: Orwell remains the most quoted political writer of the twentieth century precisely because he understood something timeless about power. Yet his relevance today is not merely political. It is existential. His work illuminates not only how governments manipulate truth, but how human beings accommodate themselves to lies when reality becomes too painful, complex, or inconvenient to bear.

The film takes its title from the most famous act of psychological coercion in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984): Winston Smith’s forced acceptance that two plus two equals five. The slogan has become a cultural shorthand for ideological conformity, but Peck wisely understands that its significance extends far beyond partisan politics. Orwell’s real subject was the destruction of objective reality itself. Tyranny begins not when citizens are forbidden to speak but when they lose confidence in their own perceptions.

This insight resonates with extraordinary force today. Across the world, democratic institutions appear increasingly fragile. Political leaders cultivate alternative realities. Social media transforms opinion into identity and identity into tribal warfare. Artificial intelligence generates persuasive fictions at industrial scale. Facts compete with narratives; narratives compete with emotions. In such an environment, Orwell’s vision no longer feels prophetic. It feels descriptive.

Peck structures the documentary around Orwell’s final years on the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he struggled to complete 1984 while tuberculosis consumed his body. Damian Lewis’s voiceover brings Orwell’s letters and diaries to life with remarkable intimacy. What emerges is not the image of a literary monument but of a frail, exhausted man writing under the shadow of death. Orwell himself remarked that the novel was written “under the influence of tuberculosis.” The observation is more profound than it first appears. Few works of literature possess such muscular intellectual confidence while being created by someone physically collapsing. The body was failing; the mind remained fiercely independent.

Peck juxtaposes Orwell’s illness with the obsession of authoritarian systems for strength, fitness, and spectacle. It is one of many subtle ironies in the film. Tyrannies often worship physical power because genuine intellectual freedom remains beyond their control. Orwell understood that the strongest act of resistance is sometimes simply to perceive reality accurately.

Yet the greatest achievement of Orwell: 2+2=5 lies in its insistence that Orwell’s ideas emerged not from abstraction but from experience. Before he became Orwell, he was Eric Blair: colonial policeman, socialist journalist, reluctant celebrity, and perhaps most importantly, witness.

No book demonstrates this better than Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the Orwell work that taught me more about the human condition than any of his political writings. While Animal Farm and 1984 transformed him into a global icon, Down and Out reveals the moral intelligence behind those later masterpieces and highlights the societal structures that keep the very poor from pulling out of their predicament.

The book chronicles Orwell’s immersion in poverty among dishwashers, tramps, laborers, and the homeless. Unlike many social observers, Orwell does not sentimentalize suffering. Nor does he reduce poverty to economics. He understands that deprivation alters one’s relationship with time, dignity, self-respect, and possibility itself.

What remains astonishing nearly a century later is the precision of his observations. Orwell describes homelessness not merely as the absence of shelter but as a condition of social invisibility. The poor become people whom society ceases to notice except as problems to be managed. Reading those pages today, one recognizes contemporary cities in every line. The tents beneath overpasses, the encampments near luxury developments, the widening gap between prosperity and precarity—all seem anticipated by Orwell’s unsparing gaze.He possessed what might be called a Saturnian view of reality: cold, disciplined, resistant to illusion. 

He rarely offered solutions. Instead, he illuminated mechanisms. He showed how institutions shape consciousness, how economic structures influence morality, and how language obscures suffering. His greatness lay not in resolving contradictions but in revealing them.

This quality distinguishes Orwell from many contemporary political commentators. Modern discourse often demands certainty, allegiance, and moral clarity. Orwell distrusted all three. He was capable of criticizing imperialism while acknowledging his own complicity in colonial structures. He fought for socialism while exposing the crimes of Soviet communism. He championed ordinary people while remaining painfully aware of his own class origins.

This complexity forms one of the most compelling themes in D.J. Taylor’s biography, "Orwell: A New Life" (Little, Brown, 496 pages). As Peter Marks observed in his insightful essay, “The self-fashioning of George Orwell,” the enduring fascination of Orwell lies partly in “the difference between the kind of person he was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be.” Marks, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney and author of George Orwell the Essayist, identifies a central tension that runs throughout Orwell’s life: the perpetual effort to transform Eric Blair into George Orwell.

Indeed, Orwell may have been literature’s greatest self-invention. The colonial schoolboy became the champion of the dispossessed. The Etonian intellectual became the chronicler of miners and tramps. The aspiring novelist became history’s most influential political writer. Yet the transformation was never complete. Taylor’s biography wisely avoids hagiography. It presents Orwell as brilliant, courageous, occasionally prejudiced, sometimes contradictory, and frequently difficult.

These contradictions do not diminish Orwell. They make him more valuable.

Peck’s documentary occasionally glides past some of these uncomfortable dimensions. The controversies surrounding Orwell’s list of suspected communist sympathizers, his complicated attitudes toward women and homosexuality, and aspects of his political judgment receive limited attention. Yet even these omissions inadvertently underscore a larger truth: Orwell’s significance does not depend on personal perfection.

His authority derives from intellectual honesty.

In an era increasingly obsessed with ideological purity, Orwell’s willingness to examine his own assumptions feels almost revolutionary. He recognized that the most dangerous lies are often those we tell ourselves.

The contemporary parallels are impossible to ignore. When Orwell wrote about Newspeak, he was describing the manipulation of language to narrow the boundaries of thought. Today, linguistic battles dominate public life. Political movements across the spectrum compete to define permissible vocabulary. Social media rewards outrage while punishing nuance. Algorithms amplify certainty and suppress ambiguity.

Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence introduce new forms of epistemological instability. Deepfakes, synthetic media, automated propaganda, and algorithmic persuasion all threaten to blur distinctions between reality and fabrication. Orwell did not predict the technology. He predicted the psychology.

That is why Orwell: 2+2=5 feels so urgent.

" Orwell described the four penny coffin as an inexpensive and comparatively safe sleeping option for the poor of London." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London

Peck’s montage of contemporary figures—Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu and others—does not argue that today’s democracies have become Oceania. Rather, it demonstrates how authoritarian impulses emerge repeatedly under different ideological banners. Orwell understood that tyranny has no permanent political home. It can wear the language of nationalism, revolution, religion, security, or even freedom.

The film’s most moving moments occur when it returns to Orwell’s faith in what he called the “proles”—ordinary people whose common sense remains resistant to official dogma. Peck offers this as a note of cautious hope. Yet it is a fragile hope.

For Orwell never believed progress was inevitable. Civilization survives only when individuals maintain the courage to see clearly and speak truthfully.

That may be the ultimate lesson of both Peck’s documentary and Orwell’s life. The battle over reality is never finally won. Every generation inherits it anew.

Today, amid information warfare, political polarization, technological disruption, rising authoritarianism, and deepening social inequality, Orwell’s work remains indispensable not because he predicted our future but because he understood our nature. He knew that human beings crave belonging, certainty, and meaning. He also knew that these desires make us vulnerable to manipulation.

Few writers have explored this dilemma with greater clarity.

And few films have captured its contemporary urgency as effectively as Orwell: 2+2=5.

The documentary leaves us with an uncomfortable realization. Orwell’s genius was not that he imagined a world where two plus two equals five. His genius was understanding how easily people might accept it—and how difficult, lonely, and necessary it is to insist that it equals four.

 

Epilogue: The Man Behind the Myth

To understand why Orwell still speaks so urgently to the twenty-first century, one must look beyond 1984 to the deeper moral formation that began with Down and Out in Paris and London. More than a memoir of poverty, it established the ethical lens through which Orwell would view power, class, and human dignity. Living among tramps, laborers, and the homeless taught him that suffering is not merely economic; it is a form of social invisibility. The compassion and unsentimental realism that animate his later work originate here.

Yet Orwell himself was a creation. As Orwell: A New Life argues, there remained a persistent tension between Eric Blair, the Eton-educated son of empire, and George Orwell, the self-fashioned champion of ordinary people. The scholar Peter Marks has perceptively described this as the gap between the person Orwell was and the person he aspired to become. That tension generated much of his intellectual energy.

His experience in the Spanish Civil War, later immortalized in Homage to Catalonia, convinced him that propaganda could distort reality as effectively as bullets. It was there that Orwell witnessed ideological factions rewriting events in real time, a revelation that became the foundation of his later warnings about totalitarianism.

None of this absolves Orwell's flaws. His documented prejudices, his discomfort with homosexuality, and his infamous list of suspected “crypto-communists” remain troubling facts. Yet they neither invalidate his insights nor reduce his achievement. Orwell's greatness lies partly in his willingness to expose uncomfortable truths, including those about himself.

What makes him indispensable today is that his concerns have evolved rather than disappeared. Newspeak has become algorithmic manipulation. State propaganda now coexists with AI-generated misinformation. Surveillance is no longer only governmental but commercial, embedded in platforms that monitor attention, behaviour, and desire. Democratic societies increasingly fragment into competing realities, each sustained by its own information ecosystem.

Many of Orwell's contemporaries remain admired; Orwell remains necessary. The reason is simple: he understood that the ultimate political struggle is not between left and right, but between truth and the forces determined to dissolve it. That battle, perhaps more than ever, is now our own.

The images depict the neighborhoods in Paris and London where he lived in extreme poverty.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

LA MÉTHODE FELDENKRAIS DE CHANTAL MARTIN

Pour en savoir plus sur la Méthode Feldenkrais et la possibilité de traitements personalisés, suivez ce lien: https://massagefeldenkrais.com/index.html

J’ai connu Chantal Martin alors que nous suivions toutes deux un cours portant sur les femmes en affaires. À cette époque, je ne connaissais pratiquement rien à la méthode Feldenkrais ni à son potentiel pour améliorer la mobilité et le bien-être. Dans le cadre de cette formation, Chantal m’a offert un échantillon de sa pratique sous forme d’un traitement individuel. Cette expérience, qui pouvait sembler simple à première vue, a eu un impact durable sur ma compréhension de mon propre corps.

Comme beaucoup de personnes de ma génération, je vivais avec des tensions constantes dans la nuque et les épaules. J’avais fini par considérer cet état comme normal, sans vraiment réaliser à quel point ces tensions étaient présentes et limitaient ma liberté de mouvement. Pendant cette séance d’essai, j’ai eu une véritable prise de conscience. J’ai été frappée de constater jusqu’à quel point mon cou et mes épaules étaient contractés en permanence. Cette découverte a été un choc, mais aussi une révélation : il existait une autre façon d’habiter mon corps, avec plus de souplesse, de confort et de conscience.

Les années ont passé. Plus de dix ans après cette première rencontre, j’ai développé un problème important à l’épaule droite. La douleur était telle que ma mobilité était sévèrement réduite et que certains mouvements étaient devenus presque impossibles. En cherchant une solution, je me suis souvenue de cette expérience marquante vécue avec Chantal. J’ai alors repris contact avec elle afin de recevoir des traitements individuels.

Cette décision a marqué un tournant important dans mon rétablissement. Grâce aux séances avec Chantal, j’ai progressivement retrouvé la mobilité et la flexibilité de mon épaule. Au-delà de l’amélioration physique, j’ai découvert une approche globale qui m’a permis de mieux comprendre mes habitudes de mouvement et la façon dont elles influençaient mon confort quotidien. Encouragée par les résultats, j’ai commencé à participer aux cours que Chantal offre au Centre Shambala. Ces ateliers sont devenus une source précieuse d’apprentissage et de développement personnel.

Mon parcours avec la méthode Feldenkrais ne s’est toutefois pas arrêté là. Un jour, alors que je marchais dans un parc, je me suis blessée de façon assez importante. La douleur était intense et il m’était impossible de poursuivre ma promenade comme prévu. C’est à ce moment que j’ai réalisé à quel point les apprentissages développés dans les ateliers étaient devenus intégrés. Malgré la douleur, j’ai pris conscience de mon état, de mon environnement et des différentes options qui s’offraient à moi pour rentrer chez moi en sécurité. Pas à pas, j’ai évalué mes capacités, ajusté mes mouvements et utilisé les principes de conscience corporelle acquis au fil des années. J’ai réussi à revenir chez moi lentement, mais avec confiance, en appliquant concrètement ce que j’avais appris.

Par la suite, j’ai également dû faire face à une opération majeure. Encore une fois, les traitements reçus auprès de Chantal ont joué un rôle déterminant dans ma récupération. Ils m’ont aidée à retrouver progressivement ma mobilité, ma capacité à marcher et à reprendre une vie active.

Aujourd’hui, lorsque je regarde le chemin parcouru, je constate qu’il ne me reste qu’environ 15 % des limitations de mobilité dont je souffrais lors de mes premiers rendez-vous privés avec Chantal Martin. Les bénéfices que j’ai retirés de cette démarche sont, pour moi, incalculables. Au-delà de l’amélioration physique, cette approche m’a permis de retrouver une plus grande autonomie, une meilleure qualité de vie et, surtout, une véritable joie de vivre. Je suis profondément reconnaissante envers Chantal pour son accompagnement, son expertise et son engagement à aider les gens à retrouver leur plein potentiel de mouvement.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

DISCLOSURE DAY in theatres June 12

 “Disclosure Day” Review: Spielberg Returns to the Stars, but Wonder Proves Harder to Recover Than Belief

Nearly half a century after Close Encounters of the Third Kind transformed extraterrestrial life into a cinematic language of awe, Steven Spielberg returns to familiar cosmic territory with Disclosure Day, an ambitious, emotionally charged thriller about government secrecy, alien contact, and humanity’s capacity for empathy. It is a film that arrives at a peculiar cultural moment. What once belonged to the realm of speculative fantasy now occupies an increasingly crowded space of congressional hearings, declassified files, viral UFO videos, and endless online conspiracy ecosystems. The challenge facing Spielberg is not simply convincing audiences that extraterrestrials might exist. It is convincing them that the possibility still inspires wonder.

Disclosure Day succeeds brilliantly as a thriller and often as a philosophical drama. Yet it never fully recaptures the transcendent sense of revelation that made Spielberg’s greatest science-fiction films feel like encounters with the unknown itself. Instead, it becomes something more complicated: a reflection on a society so saturated with information, suspicion, and mythology that even the arrival of the extraordinary risks feeling familiar.

The film opens with remarkable confidence, plunging viewers directly into crisis rather than discovery. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a government contractor turned whistleblower, is already fleeing powerful forces determined to suppress evidence of extraterrestrial contact. The familiar first-act journey toward revelation has already happened somewhere off-screen. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp are less interested in whether aliens exist than in what happens after certainty arrives.

TRAILER

That narrative choice gives Disclosure Day its distinctive energy. Rather than a mystery, the film becomes a chase. Daniel possesses decades of classified evidence documenting alien encounters, hidden research programs, and the machinery of institutional deception. Pursuing him is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the weary architect of a secrecy regime convinced that disclosure would fracture civilization itself.

Running parallel to Daniel’s story is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist whose life is abruptly altered by inexplicable abilities. She can perceive hidden emotional truths, understand languages she has never learned, and eventually becomes a conduit for communication beyond ordinary human understanding. As Daniel and Margaret move toward one another, the film constructs a collision between political truth and spiritual revelation.

The structure occasionally threatens to overwhelm itself. Koepp’s screenplay is packed with ideas concerning faith, institutional power, psychological evolution, collective memory, and the ethics of disclosure. Some scenes exist almost entirely to articulate competing worldviews. Characters frequently debate whether humanity is ready for the truth, whether religion can survive confirmation of non-human intelligence, and whether secrecy has protected civilization or merely infantilized it.

Yet Spielberg remains one of cinema’s great conductors of movement. Even when the script grows talkative, the film never feels static. Collaborating once again with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg transforms exposition into momentum. The camera glides, circles, pivots, and pursues. Action sequences unfold with extraordinary clarity and elegance, particularly a dazzling set piece involving a collision of automobiles, railways, and impossible timing. Few directors understand spatial storytelling with Spielberg’s instinctive mastery.

John Williams’ score, meanwhile, serves as the film’s emotional bloodstream. At ninety-four, Williams continues to compose music that does not merely accompany images but elevates them into something mythic. His themes here alternate between urgency and yearning, reminding audiences that beneath the conspiracy mechanics lies a deeply human story about connection.

The performances anchor the film’s loftier ambitions. O’Connor gives Daniel an appealing uncertainty. Unlike traditional action heroes, he appears burdened rather than empowered by his role in history. He is not a chosen savior so much as an accidental custodian of dangerous knowledge.

Blunt delivers the film’s strongest work. Margaret’s transformation could easily have descended into abstraction, but Blunt grounds the character in vulnerability. She portrays a woman overwhelmed by the sudden collapse of emotional boundaries. Every glance becomes an act of involuntary intimacy. Every interaction carries the weight of another person’s hidden pain. Her performance quietly reframes the film’s central concern. Disclosure, Spielberg suggests, is not ultimately about aliens. It is about seeing one another clearly.

Colman Domingo brings warmth and moral conviction to Hugo Wakefield, a former insider who has dedicated himself to exposing the truth. Domingo possesses an effortless authority that makes even the screenplay’s most explanatory passages feel persuasive. Firth, by contrast, avoids caricature. His Noah Scanlon is not a villain driven by greed or malice but a bureaucrat exhausted by responsibility. The film’s most compelling tension emerges from the possibility that both men may be right.

Yet for all its strengths, Disclosure Day reveals an intriguing limitation. Spielberg’s enduring message has always centered on empathy and acceptance of the Other. Here, extraterrestrials function once again as mirrors through which humanity can rediscover its better instincts. The problem is that the aliens themselves feel curiously underimagined.

The film draws heavily from familiar twentieth-century UFO mythology: Roswell, Area 51, secret autopsies, hidden archives, government cover-ups. These ideas remain culturally potent, but they belong to an older imaginative framework. In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced cosmology, and unprecedented visual sophistication, the extraterrestrials often appear tethered to mid-century conceptions of alien life.

Their physical representations are perhaps the film’s weakest element. While technically accomplished, many of the designs evoke established cultural archetypes rather than genuinely novel forms of intelligence. One wishes Spielberg had pushed further. These beings could have shimmered between states of matter, communicated through emotional architecture, or embodied forms that challenged human perception itself. Instead, they frequently resemble descendants of decades-old iconography.

This is where Disclosure Day differs most profoundly from Close Encounters. The earlier film created imagery that reshaped popular culture. This one inherits imagery that culture has already absorbed, repeated, and commodified. Spielberg once defined how audiences imagined extraterrestrial life. Here, he appears to be responding to a mythology that has grown beyond him. And yet dismissing the film on those grounds would be a mistake. Because while Disclosure Day may not inspire wonder in the traditional sense, it achieves something else. It interrogates the nature of belief in an age when information is limitless but trust is scarce.

The film repeatedly asks whether truth possesses intrinsic value. Would disclosure unite humanity? Or would it deepen existing fractures? Would evidence liberate us, or simply become another weapon in endless ideological conflict? These questions resonate far beyond science fiction. The emotional climax, which arrives not through spectacle but through recognition, demonstrates Spielberg’s continuing faith in cinema as a moral force. It is unabashedly sentimental. Some viewers will resist its sincerity. Others may find it deeply moving precisely because it refuses cynicism.

For all its fascination with extraterrestrials, Disclosure Day ultimately argues that humanity’s greatest challenge is not making contact with alien intelligence. It is recovering our capacity for empathy in a world drowning in noise. The film never achieves the overwhelming wonder of Spielberg’s finest science-fiction work. It follows cultural myths more often than it creates new ones. Its extraterrestrials remain less imaginative than its ideas. Yet even when it stumbles, Disclosure Day possesses a seriousness of purpose and emotional conviction that distinguish it from most contemporary blockbusters. It is not a close encounter with the sublime. But it is an intelligent, engrossing, and unexpectedly thoughtful meditation on truth, belief, and the fragile bonds that hold civilization together. In an era increasingly defined by distrust, Spielberg’s enduring faith in human connection remains its own kind of radical act.

Epilogue: The great irony of Disclosure Day is that Spielberg has returned to extraterrestrials only to discover that the real mystery is no longer whether we are alone in the universe. It is whether we can still be astonished by anything at all

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

NERVURES au cinéma dès le 12 juin

BANDE ANNONCE

 ENGLISH translation app above

Nervures veut être un film de contamination — une œuvre où le deuil infecte l’espace, où les silences familiaux moisissent dans les murs d’un village oublié, où l’horreur naît moins du surnaturel que de l’effritement psychologique. Sur papier, l’ambition est réelle. Dans son exécution, toutefois, le film de Raymond St-Jean demeure prisonnier de ses propres intentions, incapable de transformer son riche matériau thématique en expérience viscérale cohérente. Il en résulte une œuvre qui intrigue par fragments, mais qui peine constamment à trouver son âme.

Le point de départ possède pourtant une force indéniable. Isabelle quitte Montréal après avoir appris que son père, Maurice, est gravement malade. En rejoignant Saint-Étienne, ancien village forestier rongé par le déclin économique et l’isolement social, elle découvre une vérité plus brutale encore : son père est déjà mort. Dès lors, Nervures s’engage dans une lente descente vers l’étrangeté, multipliant les comportements inquiétants, les indices cryptiques et les tensions familiales larvées.

Cette prémisse évoque immédiatement un certain cinéma d’horreur psychologique contemporain — celui qui privilégie l’atmosphère au choc immédiat, la désintégration émotionnelle à la simple mécanique de la peur. On pense parfois aux paysages désolés de l’horreur folk, parfois au body horror organique et humide popularisé par le cinéma indépendant récent. Mais là où ces œuvres parviennent à fusionner symbolisme et émotion, Nervures reste bloqué dans une zone intermédiaire, hésitant constamment entre drame intimiste, thriller psychologique et horreur corporelle.

Le principal problème du film réside dans cette incapacité à établir un ton clair. Chaque séquence semble appartenir à une version différente du récit. Certaines scènes suggèrent une œuvre contemplative et mélancolique sur la ruralité québécoise en décomposition ; d’autres basculent abruptement dans un registre presque grotesque, saturé d’effets sonores agressifs et d’images volontairement dérangeantes. Cette oscillation permanente finit par empêcher toute immersion durable.

Là où un grand film d’horreur construit patiemment une logique émotionnelle interne, Nervures paraît constamment en train de chercher son identité. Le spectateur sent l’intention derrière chaque choix de mise en scène, mais rarement sa nécessité. Le film ne manque pas d’idées ; il manque de cohésion.

Cette fragmentation est particulièrement visible dans l’écriture des dialogues. Très tôt, les conversations révèlent une artificialité difficile à ignorer. Les personnages parlent pour transmettre de l’information plutôt que pour exister. Les répliques semblent conçues pour être lues sur une page plutôt que vécues à l’écran. Chaque échange paraît légèrement surécrit, comme si le scénario craignait le silence.

Or, le silence aurait probablement été l’arme la plus puissante de Nervures. Saint-Étienne est un décor naturellement hanté : village vidé de sa vitalité, territoire suspendu entre mémoire et abandon, espace où la forêt semble lentement reprendre ses droits sur les humains. Dans ses meilleurs moments, le film comprend cela. Une lumière tamisée sur un corridor vide, un souffle dans les arbres, une pièce où personne n’ose parler : voilà les rares instants où Nervures approche enfin l’atmosphère qu’il recherche désespérément.

Mais Raymond St-Jean surcharge continuellement son récit de dialogues explicatifs, de tensions verbales et de signaux dramatiques insistants. Ce besoin constant de verbaliser les émotions finit paradoxalement par vider le film de sa substance émotionnelle. Nervures parle énormément, mais exprime très peu.

Cette faiblesse rappelle certains problèmes déjà perceptibles dans Crépuscule pour un tueur. On y retrouve cette même tendance à confondre densité narrative et profondeur dramatique. Ici encore, le film accumule les pistes sans réellement les développer. Les éléments mystérieux apparaissent, disparaissent, puis reviennent sous d’autres formes sans toujours générer de véritable progression dramatique. Le spectateur comprend qu’un symbole est important, qu’un comportement cache quelque chose, qu’un détail possède une signification — mais le film peine à articuler clairement la logique émotionnelle reliant ces éléments.

Cela dit, il serait injuste de nier certaines qualités formelles réelles. La direction artistique, notamment, témoigne d’un souci du détail appréciable. Les décors intérieurs dégagent une texture authentique : maisons vieillissantes, bois humide, objets usés par le temps. Le film réussit parfois à créer une sensation physique de décrépitude rurale, comme si chaque pièce contenait les résidus d’un passé impossible à enterrer.

La photographie constitue également l’un des aspects les plus solides du projet. Sans jamais atteindre la virtuosité visuelle des grandes références du genre, elle propose néanmoins plusieurs compositions élégantes. L’éclairage des scènes intérieures mérite une mention particulière : des jaunes étouffés, des ombres diffuses, des lumières faibles qui évoquent moins la peur immédiate qu’une forme d’épuisement émotionnel. Dans ces moments plus retenus, Nervures laisse entrevoir le film qu’il aurait pu devenir.

Le travail sonore, en revanche, illustre parfaitement les contradictions de l’œuvre. On sent une volonté sincère de créer une expérience sensorielle immersive. Bruits organiques, textures sonores oppressantes, nappes musicales anxiogènes : tout est mis en place pour générer un malaise constant. Pourtant, cette approche finit souvent par devenir contre-productive. Le mixage surcharge plusieurs scènes au point de transformer la tension en irritation. Là où le son devrait approfondir l’angoisse, il attire parfois inutilement l’attention sur lui-même.

C’est peut-être là le cœur du problème de Nervures : le film veut constamment convaincre le spectateur qu’il est dérangeant, étrange ou profond, plutôt que de laisser ces sensations émerger naturellement. Chaque effet paraît souligné. Chaque symbole semble annoncé. Chaque montée dramatique insiste sur sa propre importance.

Même la tentative d’inclusion narrative souffre de cette impression de construction forcée. La présence d’un couple lesbien, dont l’une des partenaires est racisée, semble moins découler organiquement du récit que répondre à une volonté externe de représentation. Or, l’inclusion ne devient véritablement significative au cinéma que lorsqu’elle enrichit les dynamiques humaines ou thématiques de l’œuvre. Ici, ces personnages servent principalement de surface de projection aux préjugés des habitants plus âgés du village, sans que cette tension ne produise une véritable réflexion dramatique. Le résultat donne l’impression d’un élément ajouté plutôt qu’intégrée.

Et pourtant, malgré toutes ses maladresses, Nervures n’est jamais totalement dénué d’intérêt. Il existe dans le film une sincérité palpable — une volonté réelle d’explorer la mémoire, le deuil, la désintégration familiale et la solitude des régions abandonnées. On sent un cinéaste attiré par des images fortes, des sensations troubles, des espaces émotionnels inconfortables. Cette ambition mérite d’être reconnue.

Le problème est que cette sincérité ne suffit pas toujours à porter un film lorsque l’écriture, le rythme et la direction d’acteurs demeurent aussi inégaux. Plusieurs performances souffrent d’une direction hésitante ; certains comédiens semblent jouer dans un drame naturaliste, d’autres dans une œuvre d’horreur stylisée. Là encore, l’absence d’unité tonale fragilise l’ensemble.

Nervures devient alors un objet paradoxal : un film manifestement personnel, parfois intriguant, mais profondément désaccordé avec lui-même. Comme les nervures d’une feuille morte, ses différentes composantes restent visibles — photographie, design sonore, idées thématiques, horreur organique — sans jamais vraiment converger vers une forme vivante et harmonieuse.

Ce n’est pas un désastre complet. Ce n’est pas non plus la révélation du cinéma de genre québécois que certains y verront peut-être. C’est plutôt l’œuvre d’un réalisateur encore en recherche, tenté par plusieurs directions artistiques simultanément, sans avoir encore trouvé la discipline formelle nécessaire pour les unir.

Il reste néanmoins quelque chose de fascinant dans cet échec imparfait : la sensation persistante qu’un meilleur film hante constamment celui-ci, tapi sous ses excès de dialogues, ses ruptures de ton et ses maladresses narratives. Et c’est peut-être cette présence fantomatique — celle du film que Nervures aurait pu être — qui demeure finalement l’élément le plus troublant de l’expérience.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

You're Dating a Narcissist! streaming on MUBI now

You're Dating a Narcissist! on MUBI now

There’s a peculiar kind of cultural exhaustion that arrives when psychological terminology escapes the therapist’s office and settles permanently into everyday conversation. Once, people merely complained that an ex was selfish. Now they diagnose them with narcissistic personality disorder between iced coffee orders and TikTok uploads. Into this swamp of weaponized self-help language crashes You're Dating a Narcissist!, a fizzy, knowingly ridiculous anti-romantic comedy from director Ann Marie Allison that manages, against expectation, to be both a broad studio-style farce and a sly commentary on the way therapy-speak has become America’s preferred dialect of heartbreak.

The premise sounds almost algorithmically engineered for the social-media age: Dr. Judy Kaplan, played by Marisa Tomei with caffeinated brilliance, is a bestselling psychologist and university professor whose professional empire rests on teaching women how to identify narcissists. When her twenty-two-year-old daughter Eva abruptly announces her engagement to a handsome entrepreneur she has known for mere weeks, Judy immediately concludes that the young man is “love bombing” her. Armed with clinical jargon, maternal panic, and enough emotional baggage to sink a cruise liner, Judy drags her best friend across the country to sabotage the wedding before her daughter walks into what she believes is a psychologically abusive trap.

At first glance, the setup resembles a dozen overbearing-mother comedies stitched together with Hallmark-channel DNA. But Allison understands that the modern romantic comedy cannot survive on charm alone; it requires self-awareness. What distinguishes You’re Dating a Narcissist! from lesser streaming-era rom-coms is its recognition that contemporary dating culture is itself absurd. Everyone is diagnosing everyone else. Every argument becomes “gaslighting.” Every bad date turns into evidence of “trauma bonding.” Romance no longer unfolds through misunderstanding or longing, but through the paranoid language of emotional self-optimization.

The film’s sharpest joke is that Judy may herself embody many of the traits she obsessively attributes to others. Tomei plays her not as a villain, but as a woman whose intelligence has calcified into compulsion. Judy scrutinizes every interaction with prosecutorial intensity. A delayed text message becomes manipulation. A compliment becomes mirroring behavior. A charming smile becomes evidence of predatory charisma. Tomei’s performance is extraordinary precisely because she never pushes Judy into cartoon territory, even when the screenplay occasionally does. She gives the character a wounded humanity beneath the mania, suggesting years of unresolved betrayal and loneliness that have transformed caution into ideology.

Tomei has always possessed one of Hollywood’s most underrated gifts: the ability to make frantic behavior feel emotionally coherent. Whether in screwball comedies or dramas, she radiates intelligence while remaining deeply accessible. Here, she carries nearly every scene through sheer force of comic timing. Judy is exhausting, intrusive, and frequently irrational, yet Tomei somehow keeps her lovable. A lesser actor might have turned the role into a smug satire of therapy culture; Tomei instead reveals the fear underneath Judy’s certainty. Her obsession with narcissists is not merely academic. It is autobiographical.

The supporting cast wisely avoids trying to compete with her energy. Sherri Cola nearly steals the film as Judy’s best friend, a sharply observant woman recovering from her own toxic same-sex relationship. Cola delivers the movie’s funniest lines with a casual deadpan that prevents the comedy from becoming hysterical overload. She also grounds the film emotionally, serving as the rare character capable of recognizing Judy’s spiraling behavior without condemning her entirely.

Meanwhile, Eva and her fiancé Theo function less as fully dimensional characters than as narrative mirrors reflecting Judy’s anxieties back at her. That is both a strength and a weakness. The screenplay intentionally keeps Theo enigmatic, inviting audiences to constantly reassess whether Judy’s suspicions are justified or delusional. The film turns this ambiguity into a running game of psychological Clue. Every glance, every conveniently overheard conversation, every suspiciously timed phone call becomes another clue in Judy’s amateur investigation.

Some viewers may find this repetitive. The movie occasionally leans too heavily on sitcom misunderstandings and telegraphed fake-outs. There are moments when the screenplay practically winks at the audience before unveiling another obvious red herring. Yet Allison keeps the pacing brisk enough that the contrivances rarely linger. The film moves with the confidence of a road-trip comedy unashamed of its own silliness.

Visually, the film embraces a glossy, sun-drenched aesthetic that feels intentionally at odds with its neurotic subject matter. The boutique California resort where much of the story unfolds resembles the kind of aspirational vacation fantasy found in Nancy Meyers films, all soft linens, infinity pools, and aggressively curated serenity. Against this backdrop, Judy’s emotional unraveling becomes even funnier. She is conducting psychological warfare in paradise.

What makes the film unexpectedly resonant, however, is its unwillingness to fully mock the culture it satirizes. Allison understands that therapy language became ubiquitous for a reason: many people genuinely lacked vocabulary for emotional manipulation and abuse. The problem is not that terms like “gaslighting” or “boundaries” exist, but that they have become flattened through overuse, transformed into buzzwords emptied of specificity. Judy represents the endpoint of that phenomenon — someone so fluent in psychological frameworks that she can no longer distinguish intuition from pathology.

The screenplay’s most perceptive insight is that certainty itself can become narcissistic. Judy believes so deeply in her own expertise that she loses the ability to see people clearly. Her daughter ceases to be a young woman making complicated adult decisions and instead becomes a case study. In trying to save Eva from manipulation, Judy begins manipulating everyone around her.

This tension gives the film a surprisingly contemporary edge. Many modern comedies attempt relevance by merely referencing internet discourse. You’re Dating a Narcissist! actually interrogates it. The movie understands the strange emotional ecosystem created by online relationship culture, where vulnerability and performance have become nearly indistinguishable. Social media has trained people to narrativize every breakup as psychological warfare and every ex as diagnosable. Allison captures that phenomenon with wit rather than condescension.

If the film ultimately falls short of greatness, it is because it occasionally retreats into conventional rom-com safety when its ideas threaten to become genuinely thorny. The emotional resolutions arrive a bit too neatly. Certain character arcs feel simplified in service of maintaining the movie’s buoyant tone. One senses a sharper, darker version of this material lurking beneath the surface — a version more willing to explore the genuine damage caused by amateur psychological diagnosis masquerading as empowerment.

Still, there is something refreshing about a comedy willing to wrestle with the anxieties of contemporary intimacy while remaining unabashedly entertaining. The movie does not aspire to devastating profundity. It wants to make audiences laugh while recognizing themselves in the madness. On that level, it succeeds splendidly.

In an era when many studio comedies feel assembled by committee and sterilized by algorithmic caution, You’re Dating a Narcissist! at least possesses personality — messy, overbearing, occasionally exhausting personality, but personality nonetheless. Like Judy herself, the film can be too much. But it is rarely boring.

And perhaps that is the final irony Allison understands better than most filmmakers attempting social satire: people may misuse psychological terminology constantly, but they are doing so because modern love genuinely has become bewildering. Everyone is searching for explanations. Everyone is trying to protect themselves from being hurt again. You’re Dating a Narcissist! recognizes the absurdity of that impulse without dismissing the pain underneath it.

That balance — compassionate, chaotic, and sharply attuned to the language of modern relationships — makes the film more than a disposable streaming comedy. It makes it one of the more perceptive romantic satires in recent memory.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox

The End of the Internet streaming on MUBI now

Now screening on MUBI 

 

The End of the Internet arrives burdened by the weight of its own title. To announce “the end” of something as omnipresent, abstract, and structurally embedded as the internet is to promise revelation, catastrophe, or at the very least a coherent diagnosis. Dylan Reibling’s documentary, however, is less interested in apocalypse than in excavation. The film wanders through the physical, ideological, and emotional infrastructures that undergird the web, tracing the uneasy fault lines between decentralization and power, community and capital, resistance and techno-utopianism. What emerges is not a manifesto, nor even a complete argument, but a restless and often fascinating cinematic inquiry into who controls digital life — and who imagines they still might reclaim it.

The documentary’s greatest strength lies in its instinct that the internet is not virtual at all. Reibling repeatedly returns the viewer to material places: an anarchist squat in Berlin, an Indigenous community in the Brazilian rainforest, church basements in Northern Spain, neon-lit futurist enclaves in Taiwan, parking garages in Miami occupied by crypto-libertarian dreamers. The internet, the film insists, is geography. It is cables, servers, zoning laws, state violence, language, labor, and land. In a media landscape saturated with abstract conversations about “platforms” and “algorithms,” this emphasis on physical infrastructure feels refreshing and politically urgent.

Reibling understands that one of the central tricks of modern digital capitalism is invisibility. Platforms function best when users no longer perceive them as systems designed by human beings with economic interests, but as neutral environments — weather patterns rather than corporations. The film repeatedly punctures this illusion. It reminds us that today’s internet, once imagined as a democratizing commons, has calcified into an extraordinarily centralized structure controlled by a handful of companies whose influence extends beyond commerce into governance itself. Search, communication, memory, and identity now pass through private chokepoints.

Yet where the film becomes more intriguing — and more frustrating — is in its treatment of decentralization as a response. The documentary assembles a broad coalition of dissidents, hackers, mutual-aid organizers, Indigenous technologists, and anti-censorship activists who seek alternatives to corporate platforms and state surveillance. Some build community-owned mesh networks; others preserve data sovereignty for vulnerable populations; still others attempt to create entirely new protocols outside the architecture of Silicon Valley. Their projects are compelling precisely because they emerge from concrete local needs. In underprivileged or politically threatened spaces, decentralization appears not as ideology but survival.

The Berlin commune sequences are particularly evocative. Here, technology is framed less as innovation than as stewardship. The inhabitants speak about networks with the language of care, mutual aid, and interdependence. Their vision of decentralization is deeply social: technology should distribute power horizontally and reinforce communal resilience. In these moments, Reibling captures something genuinely moving — the lingering hope that the internet could still become a civic space rather than merely a marketplace.

But the documentary struggles to connect these isolated experiments into a larger analytical framework. The various initiatives rarely converse with one another, either literally or intellectually. The result is a film rich in atmosphere and anecdote yet curiously diffuse in argument. One leaves with admiration for the people involved, but also with an unresolved question: what exactly scales here? Can these fragmented alternatives meaningfully challenge the immense concentration of power held by multinational tech corporations, or are they ultimately local acts of symbolic resistance?

That tension becomes impossible to ignore with the inclusion of Urbit, the controversial decentralized computing project associated with Silicon Valley accelerationism and billionaire technologists. Reibling clearly positions Urbit as a counterpoint to the grassroots activism elsewhere in the film, but the contrast is so stark that it almost destabilizes the documentary’s internal logic. On one side are organizers attempting to democratize infrastructure for marginalized communities; on the other are wealthy techno-libertarians building parallel systems in anticipation of institutional collapse. Both invoke “decentralization,” yet they mean radically different things by it.

This is the film’s most provocative idea — and also the one it engages too late and too briefly. Decentralization, the documentary gradually reveals, is not inherently emancipatory. It can describe cooperative networks rooted in solidarity, or it can describe elite exit strategies designed to evade collective accountability altogether. One version disperses power downward; the other fragments society into privatized enclaves governed by wealth and technical expertise. The fact that these opposing political imaginaries share the same rhetoric is not incidental. It is the central contradiction of internet politics in the 2020s.

Reibling gestures toward this contradiction but hesitates to interrogate it fully. The Urbit material is undeniably fascinating because it introduces discomfort into a film otherwise inclined toward moral clarity. The tech founders speak in the language of sovereignty, freedom, and anti-centralization, but beneath their rhetoric lurks a familiar Silicon Valley fantasy: that social problems can be solved not through democratic struggle but through technological escape. The documentary eventually confronts one of these figures, yet the exchange arrives so late that it feels less like culmination than afterthought. One wishes the film had foregrounded this ideological conflict from the beginning.

There is also a subtle conceptual vagueness in how the film approaches centralization itself. Reibling frequently invokes the early utopian promises of the internet — openness, democracy, distributed communication — contrasting them with today’s platform monopolies. But the documentary occasionally treats decentralization as though its meaning has remained stable since the internet’s Cold War origins. In reality, the relationship between centralization and decentralization in 2025 is profoundly different than it was in the ARPANET era. Contemporary digital systems thrive through hybrid models: decentralized participation feeding centralized extraction. TikTok, YouTube, and Meta rely on billions of users generating distributed content while ownership, visibility, and monetization remain tightly controlled. The problem is not simply that the internet became centralized. It is that centralization now operates invisibly through systems that appear participatory.

The film circles this insight without fully articulating it. As a result, some of its historical framing feels incomplete. Reibling is excellent at evoking the dream of the early internet, but less incisive in explaining the economic and political mechanisms through which that dream was transformed into surveillance capitalism. “It’s all owned by two or three corporations” is true, but insufficient. How did convenience become dependency? How did openness become enclosure? The documentary raises these questions powerfully without always answering them.

Still, there is value in a film that refuses easy solutions. If The End of the Internet ultimately “tables more questions than it answers,” that may reflect the enormity of the subject itself. The internet is no longer a discrete technology but the invisible operating system of modern life, shaping politics, economics, intimacy, and memory simultaneously. Any attempt to diagnose it comprehensively risks collapsing under its own scope.

What the film does accomplish — and accomplishes well — is restoring moral and political visibility to infrastructure. Reibling forces viewers to recognize that the internet is neither inevitable nor neutral. It is designed, owned, contested, and governed. Behind every frictionless interface lies an architecture of power.

And perhaps that is what the film most convincingly foreshadows about the future of the internet: not its end, but its fragmentation into competing visions of society itself. The battle ahead may no longer be between centralized and decentralized systems in any simplistic sense. Rather, it will concern what decentralization is for, and whom it serves. One future imagines networks as commons — locally rooted, collectively governed, imperfect but democratic. Another imagines them as escape pods for the wealthy and technically literate, insulated from public obligation. Reibling’s documentary catches these two futures colliding in real time.

The internet, the film suggests, is entering its ideological phase. The infrastructure wars of the coming decade will not merely determine how information moves, but what kinds of communities remain possible in a digitally saturated world. That realization lingers long after the documentary ends — unsettling, unresolved, and impossible to entirely dismiss.

LENA GHIO   

Twitter  Facebook  Instagram   Pinterest  Paradox