Friday, February 24, 2017

The Human Surge (2016) A Film by Eduardo Williams


"Were it not for one showy transition of a camera burrowing through topsoil for a macro-photographic tour of an ant colony, The Human Surge might easily be mistaken for a particularly interminable YouTube video, unfolding as it does like the aimless time-killing of bored boys without much to do and a crummy camera to record whatever ends up happening. Facetious as such a characterization may seem for a film with the temerity to divide its action across Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines, it's not exactly unsuitable given director Eduardo Williams's subject matter, which concerns the lives of minimum-wage slackers from the aforementioned locales who fill their downtime forging tenuous human connections across Internet platforms. Using a pair of nifty cuts to connect these disparate milieus, the film develops in chapters as if to imply a fundamental interconnectedness between people across the world in similar dead-end situations, yet often the only quality holding the episodes together is the amateurishness of the staging."

Full review continues at Slant Magazine.

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