A computer program etched into the sky is simulating the lives of three people. But it’s become corrupted and their story is increasingly distorted in the telling.
Across successive scenes, the characters’ genders, ages, and relationships are fluid. In one chapter Adrianne and Antoniette might be lovers and Helen a friend, in another, Antonie might be dying and Adrian cheating with Hector. Woven through the scenes are incongruous leitmotifs — a persistent green dot in the sky, an owl, an elk: signs of the corrupted simulation, hinting at the nature of the participants’ existence.
While I was initially confused as the story frenetically morphed and glitched, and I lamented the loss of plots and settings I’d become invested in, I gradually became aware of the meta — a superposition of character and themes brought into focus by an accretion of stories.
As the setting transitions from modern life, to ancient Rome, to a hospital, to ruins, you become comfortable with the idea that an individual plot is just an ephemeral metaphorical wrapper, allowing the narrative to play out its recurring themes of love, illness, loss, and death. You cross your eyes and let go of the surface details of each vignette to appreciate the universality — a story told through the characters’ repeated behaviours and interactions, rather than the plot of a single scene.
At the halfway mark the catastrophe that led to this situation is clear and the narrative settles into an accelerated linear mode. The glitches reduce in frequency as you speed through significant chunks of time, re-living the history of human resilience through the recursive temporal echoes of the three protagonists.
This is a powerful elegiac narrative that deconstructs the act of storytelling to expose its most primal emotional form. Reminiscent of Aronofsky’s The Fountain, it’s a melancholy memorial to civilisational trauma made human-scale through the stories of personal trauma. It’s a people’s history told through the relationships of those who experience it rather than by distant historians. Those stories will outlast us.
