When a film starts off with the credit “Less Tech More Life presents…” you can probably guess where it’s going to land on certain issues. Video Vision comes from writer-director Michael Turley, whose lesstechmorelife.com website hosts a manifesto on the need to “wake ourselves up from the digital spell we are under”. The film itself is more nuanced. It understands the appeal of tech, particularly chunky, physical, retro tech, as well as the reasons why people choose to “anaethetise themselves in front of glowing screens” (to quote that manifesto again). It also understands the problems with these things. If it’s a little less clear on what we might do instead, well, so be it – it’s a mixture of hang-out romance and trippy horror, not a social policy document.
Video Vision begins as a workplace comedy, with Andrea Figliomeni’s Kibby and Shelley Valfer’s Rodney running a shop which digitises old video. Kibby is a young woman, Rodney is a middle-aged man, and in this time of generational schism there’s something weirdly heartwarming about watching them both simply getting on with each other. The dialogue is snappy and writerly in the way 1990s indies were, before the 2000s saw that tendency curdle into quirk. It allows Turley to approach his themes as a dialogue between two characters with different worldviews, rather than soapboxing.
When Rodney goes on jury duty, Kibby is faced with an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity is a romance with Gator, a trans man played by Chrystal Peterson. The problem is a mysterious VCR player that, on her first attempt to repair it, gives her an electric shock lovingly rendered as old-fashioned video-effect lightning bolts. Her relationship with the “nasty, disco-ass” machine deteriorates further when it somehow infects her, causing to see the world in blurry, standard-def vision. As her view of the world becomes more twentieth-century, so does her worldview, with her previous acceptance of Gator’s gender identity replaced with unease and suspicion.
The dialogue is snappy and writerly in the way 1990s indies were, before the 2000s saw that tendency curdle into quirk. It allows Turley to approach his themes as a dialogue between two characters with different worldviews, rather than soapboxing.
Kibby’s arguments with Gator are punctuated by ominous, neon-lit close-ups of the cursed video player, making it clear that it is somehow at the root of her changing attitudes. It means Video Vision is, on one level, a movie about having a media device infect you with transphobia, just like what happened to [name redacted because they almost certainly Google themselves]. At the same time, the neatness of the metaphor – retro tech leads to retro attitudes – does feel like it’s letting the modern world off the hook. There are some clear nods to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in here, which are well-achieved but it’s a comparison Video Vision can’t help but lose. Videodrome is a film about then-new tech which has survived that technology’s obsolescence because it is so uncannily predictive of what came afterwards. I think the logic of Video Vision‘s controlling metaphor is that Kibby and Rodney’s digitising of these old formats allows the attitudes of their era to invade the present day. If that’s the case, then it feels dangerously Whiggish: the idea that bigotry is simply old-hat and has no place in the modern world is a happy delusion that most of us have had knocked out of us over the last decade.
Admittedly it might not be saying this. The central metaphor of Video Vision is hard to pin down fully, which is sometimes disappointing – its central antagonist is particularly under-characterised – but it’s also an asset. The film’s abstract passages and hallucinatory sequences are uniformly effective, as are the films-within-the-film, which pastiche everything from children’s cartoons to sleazy prank shows. It is unfortunate that the bar for this kind of couch-potato cross-media horror has recently been set to the level of actual profundity by Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, which Video Vision coincidentally shares a body-horror image with. We don’t learn as much about Kibby’s love of the cartoon Gummipus as we do Owen and Maddy’s obsession with The Pink Opaque, but it’s still a fun digression for the film to take.
Most of all, I just liked these characters, to the extent where I felt not just worried but actively saddened when they were under threat. Video Vision is a flawed film, one which invites – knowingly and unknowingly – some comparisons that are to its detriment. Yet it ultimately overcomes its problems through the warmth of Figliomeni, Peterson and Valfer’s performances, plus Turley’s character-led writing. How’s that for an old-fashioned virtue?
Video Vision had its International Premiere at Frightfest 2024
