Psyche (Glasgow Frightfest 2025)

Take Alex Garland’s Annihilation with a smidgen of the budget and far fewer trees. Blend this with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and filter the result through Terrence Malick. That is a reductive description of Psyche, a discordant but striking journey through landscapes and mindscapes alike that received its UK premiere at Glasgow FrightFest in March 2025. With visuals that range from the super-saturated to the thoroughly bleached, Psyche befuddles and frustrates in equal measure, burrowing into the brain with the single-mindedness of a malware programme. 

Director and co-writer Stephon Stewart’s metaphysical trip (in more ways than one) focuses on Mara (Sarah Ritter). After an opening screen crawl informs the viewer that the film’s location is between life and death, we are introduced to Mara in a barren desert, with no information about the how or why of her being there. An old-style computer provides instructions as well as a companion in the form of an AI, Pi (voiced by Gibran Lozano). Through various tasks and different voices (also Lozano), Mara confronts aspects of her life and past as well as fundamental questions about life, the universe and everything (enter Douglas Adams joke here, although Psyche does not). 

To a certain extent, Psyche leans into the concept of the journey being the point rather than the destination. This will likely not surprise viewers since each destination in the film leads to another one. If this sounds rather video game-esque, it is fair to say that Stewart and co-writer Lozano (again) use an old-fashioned form of video game logic in terms of levels, a voice that provides instructions and the need for Mara to enter responses via a keyboard. This rather clunky narrative structure does not match with contemporary gaming, but it is consistent with the old-fashioned equipment that evokes a particular period. 

The visuals of the terrain are powerful, cinematographer Aitor Uribarri lending the desert landscape a burnished appearance. The production design is amusingly credited as ‘Earth’, suggesting that Stewart and Uribarri simply pointed the camera at the landscape and let it speak for itself. However, there are also very human spaces including a very effective scene when Mara finds a trailer park that seems long abandoned, graffiti on a wall expressing various pieces of contradictory advice. The helplessness, isolation and frustration are palpable as Mara beats on a wall. Another eerie moment is when she encounters a shadow double that imitates her movements, which is very reminiscent of Annihilation. 

The philosophical discussions between Mara and Pi are a less satisfying aspect of the film. This is not because these discussions fail to offer answers, but because the questions themselves are hardly probing. It is somewhat frustrating that the film stops for these discussions, as these ruminations, always accompanied by Mara’s (understandable) exasperation break the pace of the film, and with a runtime of only 71 minutes, a continuous pace would help. 

Equally frustrating yet also fascinating are the interludes or cutaways to a different plane, possibly in Mara’s head, as she converses with a figure in a plague mask who could be Death (a chess game between them seems a clear nod to The Seventh Seal), or perhaps her father, whose death clearly haunts Mara. While this is a familiar cliché (hello The Silence of the Lambs, Contact, Interstellar, The Princess and the Frog, Elektra), it can provide emotional depth to a character in terms of grief, guilt and unresolved trauma. The ongoing discussions between Mara and the masked figure do not really explore this emotion, however, making them somewhat circular. That said, a sequence involving a noose is intriguing, Stewart making effective use of visual expression rather than reliance on disconnected discussion.

The cutaway sequences are monochrome, and feature heavy use of white noise visuals, adding to the retro feel provided by the computer Mara carries with her. These moments are at their most striking during close-ups of Mara’s eyes, her iris’ reflecting the white noise on a screen before her. This static, another analogue visual, expresses the search for meaning not in emptiness, as she does in the desert, but in an excess of information. The graphics here reflect our attempts to formulate understanding in the face of past events that cannot be forgotten and a future that arrives all too quickly. 

This concern with the future relates to the film’s treatment of AI, something that is present and expected yet also hard to understand, which may be the experience that many have with this technology. However, while Mara’s emotional reaction to AI and forms of technical support may be familiar, the world-building is incomplete because the various pieces of tech simply happen and there is little sense of Mara learning to navigate this environment, beyond going from A to B thanks to instructions from Pi, despite various different voices telling her one thing and there being little struggle over whom she believes. 

The title Psyche may refer to the act of unsettling someone – Psyche ! – or could be a description of the space being Mara’s psyche. This ambiguity could describe the film as a whole, but it also comes across as indecisiveness, Stewart having crammed a great many ideas into this film but not settling on a central satisfactory thread. Nonetheless, despite or perhaps because of this inconsistency, it may be that the film will reward multiple viewings and provide plenty to puzzle over in years to come. 

VINCENT’S ARCHIVE – PSYCHE