The debut film from Irish director Andrew Legge is a pacy, thrillingly inventive found-footage mockumentary that purports to show the invention, in 1940, of a machine that can intercept television and radio broadcasts from the future. The device is named Lola in honour of the mother of the machine’s creators: two sisters, Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Mars (Stefanie Martini). And at first, Lola is a portal to new artistic and cultural frontiers. But then, as the second world war escalates, the machine becomes part of the war effort, at considerable cost to future generations: an alternative fascist reality swallows the future that the women had glimpsed.
Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.
