I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, when access to the fest was guarded by officers wielding assault rifles and thermometers. Fears of terrorist attacks and shootings have turned this tiny stretch of the Adriatic coast into a bubble on chronically high alert; while I don’t wish to downplay the kind of threats an event like this must protect itself against, I always (very naively…) thought there’d be areas around the Lido that would remain cop-free, where the panopticon wouldn’t be administered by policemen or soldiers.

Truth be told, the whole thing wouldn’t have felt nearly as ominous had it not happened in a year when anxieties about surveillance pulsed through so many Venice titles, Happyend among them. Set in “near-future” Japan—a time when, a title card warns us, “the enforcers of old frameworks are growing restless”—Neo Sora’s first feature-length foray into fiction imagines a country wrestling with two specters: a “once in a century” earthquake and a fascistic government determined to use the imminent apocalypse to its advantage. The PM’s mantra, “safety first,” trumps all civil liberties: draconian emergency decrees are passed, new surveillance devices implemented, protests dispersed. Sora’s script grafts these Orwellian paranoias onto a Tokyo high school; after a prank on the principal, a new state-of-the-art CCTV system (“Panopti,” nomen omen) is installed to monitor and punish students through a point-based system that makes even the most innocent displays of affection an offence. Sora singles out two teenage besties and classmates (Hayato Kurihara and Yukito Hidaka) as they resist authoritarianism and renegotiate their place in society. In its simplest terms, Happyend charts the boys’ political awakening, and while their arcs can sometimes feel a little formulaic, the young cast have a way of making even the most portentous lines thrum with real urgency. For a tale concerned with an undefined tomorrow, where futuristic tech is put at the service of a totalitarian regime, there’s something in turns anachronistic and stirring about Sora’s belief in the power of words to overcome and avert crises, and his faith in the collective as the ultimate catalyst for change.

Sora’s concerns with surveillance mechanisms wind up shaping Happyend’s aesthetic, with DP Bill Kirstein adjusting to the surgical stare of CCTV cameras through high-angle shots. So it is with Stranger Eyes, another film preoccupied with the way we produce and consume images of each other. Writer-director Siew Hua Yeo tracks a young father and mother from Singapore as they search for their missing baby daughter. Months after the child vanished without a trace, a series of DVDs appear at the couple’s doorstep bearing footage of them in the days before the event. It’s an eerie premise that harks back to Michael Haneke’s 2005 Caché, but Yeo is quick to connect the findings to a voyeur who lives in a flat across the street, Wu (Lee Kang-sheng). Stranger Eyes is his story, not the couple he’s been spying on, and if the film feels less revelatory than rote, gradually shedding its mysterious allure to embark on a more predictable tale of strained relationships, Lee imbues it with the disquiet Yeo’s script never quite sustains.

For all its twists, secrets, and backstories, Stranger Eyes ends up couching the relationship between its three leads as a trite codependency, following the father, Junyang (Wu Chien-ho), as he morphs from object of Wu’s obsession into Peeping Tom himself. But Lee’s character remains oblique, almost impervious to explanations in a performance that’s by and large wordless as he watches and reacts to the footage he’s captured. Lee is that rare actor who can make all words ring hollow; in all the films I’ve seen him, he’s always struck me as someone “untimely,” suspended between different worlds, so antithetical to the breakneck pace of our era as to come across as an extraterrestrial figure. There’s something about his contemplative gaze that doesn’t quite belong to our 21st century and stands in contrast with the cold glare of CCTV cameras. That chasm—between different ways of looking at and processing images—powers Stranger Eyes; nothing about the film is more compelling than the way Lee embodies that rift.

Similarly preoccupied with our current media regime, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud suggested a slight variation to the director’s most famous turn-of-the-millennium J-horrors. While those saw dread as ultimately bound with tech—with ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet and computer screens, as in 2001’s Pulse—this one tethers the terror to a whole other beast: capitalism. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a factory worker who ditches his job once he realizes he can make a lot more money buying things and reselling them online at astronomically higher prices. But no sooner does he leave Tokyo to relocate to a lakeside house with his partner Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) than ominous accidents upend their lives. What kicks off as a supernatural thriller in the vein of Kurosawa’s late nineties/early aughts classics soon swells into a bloody manhunt, as throngs of hitmen and angry customers join forces to make Yoshii pay for his scams. There are no phantoms in Cloud, yet the flesh and blood folks around Yoshii nonetheless act and sound like human shadows with no real inner life to speak of.

That’s in keeping with the film’s register. Cloud plays as a capitalist farce whose characters’ psychologies are consciously reduced to the most primitive consumerist urges: hence Akiko’s obsession with Yoshii’s credit cards; his former boss’s transformation into a vengeful stalker; or his assistant’s, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who shifts from meek aide to indomitable killing machine ready to sacrifice himself and others just so Yoshii can keep “making more money.” “Think of it as a game,” a hit man reassures another as the chase begins. It’s a line that might as well apply to the whole film. Cloud exemplifies Kurosawa’s ability to seamlessly toggle between genres and conjure spectral atmospheres through deft use of empty space and off-screen sounds; Yasuyuki Sasaki’s deep-focus wide shots heighten the suspicion that horror can creep in from anywhere, while diegetic noises—ceilings creaking, computers whirring—contaminate these offices and homes like a virus. But what’s perhaps most intriguing about the film is the way it courts other popular media; time and again, Cloud veers into video game terrain, with gunfights and dilapidated settings that might belong to any first-person shooter.

That interest in blurring the boundaries between cinema and video games unites Kurosawa’s latest with Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion, the second feature to come out of his new production house, EDGLRD. The first, Aggro Dr1ft, was a highlight of last year’s edition; after a handful of turgid biopics and prestige pictures, its insouciant disregard for narrative conventions came as a balm. That said, I’m still not sure if EDGLRD really is “boldly transforming the creative process,” per its manifesto, or if the two films offer much beyond moods and merch (the horned, devilish masks worn in both and available at the EDGLRD site for a whopping $1500 are currently sold out). The word “prankster” has been thrown at Korine long, long before this last business venture, but Aggro Dr1ft was no stunt, and neither is Baby Invasion. Whether you’ll find it riveting or nauseating—the film leaves ample room for supporters of both camps—Korine’s latest still responds to a relatively straightforward and, in my book at least, admirable project: to stress-test our understanding of cinema and explore what it can achieve once we bring it in conversation with other media. Cross it with video games and you might get something like Baby Invasion.

Shot entirely from a first-person shooter perspective, the film places you in the body of a thug as he raids some waterfront mansions around Miami with fellow Duck Mobb members—young gangsters whose faces are scrambled with AI and replaced with those of babies. Like Aggro, similarly adorned with AI and augmented reality effects, Baby Invasion is designed to capture our Very Online Lives, which is to say the torrential deluge of audiovisual stimuli our brains are subjected to on a daily basis. Sprucing up the Mobb’s murderous tours are pop-ups, pictures and icons—including assault weapons, collectible coins and pills—while the whole tour de force is accompanied by Burial’s non-stop techno score and a Twitch-like live chat with users commenting on the “action” from all corners of the earth. Neither film nor virtual reality but a depiction of the “endless now,” as a title card describes it, Baby Invasion captures our zeitgeist as a Rorschach test of different screens competing for our attention. That depiction, whatever else you’ll make of the ride, is on point.

Korine’s was among the many titles that curtailed their media engagements down to a stroll on the red carpet and the canonical press conference. I doubt Baby Invasion was everyone’s hottest ticket, but each year there are many journalists who rely on press junkets with A-list talent to break even—a feat all the more difficult in a place as expensive as the Lido in early September. So, when the glitziest star-studded vehicles decided to keep their celebrities at an arm’s length, a protest broke out. Signed by now over a hundred journos, an open letter was sent to and circulated across the trades, warning that “cinema journalism is at risk of extinction” if studios and publicists continue to forbid access to their major talent. “The decision […] puts in jeopardy an entire category of journalists, particularly freelancers, who with their passionate and relentless work often help in the success of films, give voice and prestige to directors and actors, and contribute to igniting the debate on projects that aim for the Oscars, the Golden Globes and other prestigious awards.”

It’s a legitimate argument, though I can’t help but find the premise alarming, not least for the way it reduces our profession to an extension of a film’s marketing department—a critic is not and never will be a publicist, and the growingly porous distinction between the two should be a cause for concern for all lovers of the art. But I’m also not oblivious to the stark inequalities that festivals and festival journalism thrive on, or the way we aren’t all free to write about the things we might want to. The press junket pits the likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt (co-stars in Jon Watts’s out-of-competition entry Wolfs, unavailable to the press) against a platoon of journalists for some rapid-fire soundbite questions. It’s a highly controlled environment where chances to extract non-studio-sanctioned material are few and far between; write unfavorably about the movie and you might not be invited back. Still, that the biggest vehicles at Venice or any other festival like it are those that journalists tend to gravitate towards isn’t (always) a matter of taste, but a lack of choice. These are often the very titles that most outlets will want to cover and commission; it’s not that we aren’t free to dislike them, but that we aren’t free to ignore them altogether and focus solely on more marginal films.

If all you saw at the 81st Venice Film Festival was the official competition, however, chances are you’d have left the Lido with some nefarious thoughts about the state of the medium. Staid biopics (Pablo Larraín’s umpteenth film-sarcophagus, Maria), lifeless IP drivel (Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie À Deux) and stilted adaptations (Luca Guadagnino’s take on William S. Burroughs’s novella Queer) littered the list of the Golden Lion hopefuls, one of the most dispiriting I can remember. One notable exception came in the shape of April, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature. Like her first, Beginning (2020), this too unfurls as the story of a persecution. Ia Sukhitashvili, the lead in Beginning, returns as Nina, an OB-GYN who moonlights as an illegal abortionist in rural Georgia; when a delivery goes wrong and a newborn dies under her watch, the hospital launches an inquiry that threatens to expose her work outside office hours. In turns punitively bleak and spellbinding, April also shares with its predecessor a proclivity for the transcendental, committed as it is to shedding light on the most terrifying aspects of Nina’s routine as well as the discontinuous moments of awe that intersperse it. But April’s visual grammar differs starkly from Beginning’s. Arseni Khachaturan shot both, and while each traffics in long takes, April swaps Beginning’s static shots for a handheld camera, which aligns our perspective to Nina’s to an often unnerving degree. If Beginning invited us to watch as her character experienced an epiphany, a miracle of sorts, at its most mesmerizing April lets us experience one ourselves. Surreal visions abound, including a sinister humanoid seen roaming Nina’s apartment—its body a naked chrysalis, its face a mask of flesh. Instead of explaining them away, April relishes in all its mysteries, gradually abandoning its abrasive realism to enter a more dreamlike realm. This generative tension between the magic and morbid is the film’s strongest asset, and the source of its unsettling allure.

Grim as it so often is, April’s unwavering faith in the camera and its ability to shed light on the invisible came as a jolt of electricity. Only another official competition entry approximated something similar: Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Spanning three and a half hours—including a fifteen-minute intermission—and shot entirely on VistaVision, Corbet’s saga was designed, per his own admission, to ape the feel and textures of the big Hollywood epics from the forties and fifties, the decades in which most of this takes place. If there’s anything genuinely untimely about The Brutalist, however, that’s its writer-director’s belief in the medium’s power to yield large scale, sweeping spectacles on par with those classics. True, Corbet is by no means the only filmmaker stuck in the past that way. As far as scope and ambitions go, his approach isn’t all that different from the maximalist style of the few directors his latest was hastily compared to the second the festival’s embargo on reviews and social media reactions was lifted—Francis Ford Coppola, Christopher Nolan, and Paul Thomas Anderson. But Corbet’s filmmaking here exudes an effortlessness that makes The Brutalist fitfully breath-taking. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it self-effacing, but when the film landed on its most otherworldly moments, the transcendence didn’t register as the result of painstaking choices, but an alchemy of sounds and images coming together in near-perfect harmony, which is all the more impressive for a film that’s about toil.

Centered on a Jewish Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), The Brutalist tracks its wandering hero as he moves to Pennsylvania at the end of the war and winds up recruited by a local millionaire (Guy Pearce) to build for him a gigantic community center—an impossible project to which László devotes years of his life. For all the highfalutin musings on the way buildings can withstand the whips and scorns of time, however, Corbet couches architecture as genuine and genuinely hard work. The Brutalist doesn’t gloss over the arduous efforts required to bring art into the world, nor is it oblivious to the human suffering and exploitation these efforts entail. Corbet posits the monstrously big community center as a manifestation of the American Might, but the project is built on the sweat and blood of immigrant workers—not least Tóth, a Jewish man surrounded by gentiles who waste no opportunity to dehumanize him, both verbally and physically. By the end, Tóth’s titanic undertaking no longer stands as a celebration of its creator’s genius, but the embodiment of his suffering, a fitting ending for a film that suggests we’re doomed to carry our traumas to each new place we call home.

“The systems that define people are crumbling,” a title card prophesied early into Happyend. From Sora’s to Corbet’s, the best films I saw at Venice all radiated that same fatalism. We have wrecked this world, and there’s no going back; perhaps the best cinema can offer now isn’t a way out of the catastrophe but a means to process it. That’s a good way of thinking about No Sleep Till. Like Happyend, Alexandra Simpson’s first feature is haunted by a looming threat: a hurricane on its way to hit Florida in what meteorologists predict will be a devastating event. Unfurling as a series of vignettes and storylines that never quite intersect, No Sleep Till follows a few drifters as they brace for the storm. Like Brett Story’s The Hottest August (2019), this isn’t a tale about the cataclysm so much as one about the way people internalize it—how a crisis changes the way we think of ourselves in relation to the world and those around us.

No Sleep Till is the third Omnes Films production to premiere at one of the Big Three fests in 2024; like Carson Lund’s Eephus and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, two Cannes standouts, Simpson’s is so fluent in small-town America it can swell the dullest stretch of suburbia into a fantasia of strange rituals and stranger visions. Shot by Sylvain Froidevaux, the neon-soaked palette immortalizes empty motels and diners as oneiric, liminal spaces. True to its title, No Sleep Till straddles waking life and dreams; there is a somnambulist logic to the way it hopscotches across characters and stories, parceling out clues as to who these loners may be, but never filling the gaps for us. Simpson’s film works in small increments, in a sort of arborescent sprawling structure that respects neither time nor space. Shards of personal histories and memories are picked up by the wind and tossed far away before surfacing again down the road; it’s as if the hurricane had shaped the film’s loopy narrative.

That same restraint was also the crowning glory of another remarkable feature debut, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, which took home the Best First Feature award, as well as Best Director and Best Actress in the Orizzonti sidebar. The actress is Kathleen Chalfant, and she plays Ruth, an octogenarian with dementia who transitions to assisted living and adjusts to life in a retirement community in California. It’s a funereal premise, but Friedland subverts it in a way other dramas of its ilk seldom do. Instead of picturing old age as an inexorable disintegration, Familiar Touch portrays it as a sort of re-birth. Cognitive skills might deteriorate, but new senses awake; dementia isn’t (just) a debilitating condition but a different way of living in one’s body. And rather than reducing Ruth to a passive victim, Friedland and Chalfant craft her as a three-dimensional figure powered by a no-nonsense, pragmatic swagger that steers the film clear of cheap sentimentality. Like Simpson’s, Friedland’s script refuses to iron out Ruth’s ambiguities. We come to know her gradually, through intimations as opposed to big statements. Sounds are crucial; as the woman’s grip on reality loosens, the symphony of diegetic and non-diegetic noises Eli Cohn assembles unpeels new layers of Ruth’s past.

In what’s possibly the most mesmeric sequence, Ruth is seen floating in a pool, gently cradled by a carer; sounds and memories collide, collapsing space and time and catapulting her back to a childhood reverie. How rare to find a film that affords its subject and audience the same respect. By refusing to infantilize Ruth’s drama or decipher it for us, Friedland assumes we’re all equipped to figure things out ourselves—or, better yet, ditch that impulse to connect the dots and luxuriate instead in the film’s silences and suggestions. Familiar Touch demands something of us viewers: a willingness to adjust to Ruth’s worldview, which is to say the relentless flow of stimuli and memories she’s inundated by, and the way these can intersect and contradict one another. At a time when films that seek to do anything other than entertain are pegged as irreparably pretentious, Friedland’s approach feels almost subversive. But for those willing to embrace its wavelength, Familiar Touch is nothing short of engrossing, that rarest of works that lives up to Roger Ebert’s vision of cinema: an empathy machine.