Following his Locarno festival-winning experimental film The Human Surge in 2016, Argentinian director Eduardo Williams apparently couldn’t be bothered with part two – which doesn’t exist – and skips straight to number three. That’s also the opaque MO with which he operates in this similarly continent-hopping odyssey; a bleary trail of hopeful and restless peregrinations and chat from three groups of twentysomethings in Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan, who often stray without warning into each other’s segments while declaring things like: “I want to see maps of nearby regions and listen to the dreams of my crazy friends.”
Filmed with a 360-degree VR camera that orbits around these pilgrims, a full-blown digital-age existential crisis seems to be in force here. People bemoan bullshit jobs, parse language disparities, contemplate post-tsunami building methods in Sri Lanka. Winding their way to a possible jungle utopia, the Peruvians fret about the local hazards: maybe “mega-billionaires” are living up in the tree canopy. Less defined characters than particles in search of a fixed state, they briefly find one at the end of the forest trail. Suspended in heavenly river water, the talk turns lightly erotic as they pair off into same-sex couples.
This beatific interlude prefigures a final climax, as Williams ramps up the formalistic fireworks. Another forest-scape whips itself, in one 10-minute shot, into a kaleidoscopic frenzy. Then as the ensemble unite for a mountain trek, one person’s face breaks out in pixels, and the world – with the camera increasingly ovoid – seems to bifurcate into new dimensions and topologies. Perhaps the point of the preceding dowdiness was to set up this hyperreal epiphany; the circuitous dialogue and patience-testing pacing may also have been priming us for sweet release. But the film is so dispersed and, often, so dissociated from its human beings that it has scant thematic or emotional centre for Williams’ striking techniques to play off.
• The Human Surge 3 is at the ICA, London, from 5 April.
