TIFF ’23: “The Human Surge 3” is cinema’s dream of itself

by Cláudio Alves

I don’t even know where we are and you keep asking where we’re going.

Where is cinema going? Does it know where or what’s ahead? Is it like us - lost in the dark, blindly navigating a road somewhere, maybe nowhere? Perhaps it’s just like us in other ways, too. Can it dream? It must. When it leaves the waking life to visit Morpheus’ realm, it may consider yesterday, today, and tomorrow, others and itself, the possible made impossible, and the other way around, too. Paths appear and disappear as the mind wanders, a string of consciousness twisting itself mad. I’m not sure if writer/director Eduardo Williams’ films know where they’re going, but they’re undoubtedly mad. They dream the future and themselves, infinite possibility.

So it was with 2016’s debut, Human Surge (2016), and so it is with its follow-up, The Human Surge 3, one of the most exciting films at this year’s TIFF…

Often, people draw a sharp dividing line between being online and their real life when talking about virtual space. There’s this thing that exists only onscreen, essentially separated from what’s outside. You can even categorize it as a faulty representation of what’s true, glitch-like variations on something it can’t capture though it tries. Then, you have the real world, that material plane where we live and touch, where we move through space rather than through its online amalgamation. But what if the realm that exists solely on the screen was a reality with its own truths and untruths, divorced from what defines off screen existence as the real deal? 

In the first The Human Surge, Eduardo Williams posited the hyperlinks between three friend groups in the so-called developing world, using the internet’s connectivity to squeeze cinematic distances and let the camera roam in violation of physical norms. The screen could regard another screen, jump into it, and appear on the other side of the world without a single cut, all through lo-fi means that disguised the image’s radicalism. By inhuman means, humanity finds a new home, a notion depicted with neutral optimism rather than doomsday portent. This machine-made cosmos need not be anti-human; Williams finds a digital humanism unlike anything else happening in cinema today. 

Skipping a stage of development (there's no second film), Human Surge gives way to The Human Surge 3, a bolder exercise where the marriage of movement and distortion, the divorce of image and sound, further widens the frontiers of a new digital age. Once again, the director considers three groups living in disparate parts of the globe – a Sri Lankan jungle persisting in the aftermath of disaster, a Peruvian seaside town where queer youth find joy, and aTaiwanese town under the ceaseless battering of tropical rains. If the assumption of documentary verisimilitude was already dubious in the first film, this second-third part does away with any pretension. Just listen to the chatter.

Speaking constantly of sometime ahead, whether humanity’s future or next weekend’s party plans, the dialogue could be read as arrhythmic poetry, often bizarre pronouncements described in simplistic terms that taste like that illogic logic of dreams. Maybe more than the image itself, these dialogues hint at the dreamland of The Human Surge 3, diluting paradigms of "reality" before the full scope of Williams’ project is even evident. At times, the characters come close to commenting on their digital disfigurement, acknowledging that they are now creatures of the screen instead of passive subjects depicted on it.

Soon, figures from one setting appear in another with no explanation, trans-idiomatic conversations waver between nonsense and mutual understanding, vignettes develop without legible causality or narrative coherence. Then again, traditional storytelling was never on the table when cerebral provocations are preferable. Gradually, the viewer accepts that The Human Surge 3 is its own (un)closed universe. Throughout film history, realist movements tried to attain the real by copying what they saw. Williams creates his own real by deforming the camera’s sight into its own thing, marvelously unique, disquietingly so.

All these paragraphs and I haven’t even touched upon The Human Surge 3’s most salient characteristic. The entire thing is shot with a 360º camera in near-perpetual motion, wandering the earth in apparent independence from the people it pertains to follow. At times, it feels like the humans are searching the camera, not the other way around, like the recording device is a sentient property lost in some wild stream of thought, unconscious consciousness. More important than that, however, are the formalist characteristics of this approach, an image cursed or blessed, with never-ending deformity. It only becomes weirder as it goes along. The director actively seeks digital seams rather than hiding them. 

For those usually bored by storyless cinematic exercises, the chimeric properties of an ever-changing frame might make up for the alienation. I think back to how someone caught in the limit of the 360º vision seems to fade in and out of existence, like a reflection on a watery surface. Another moment finds the camera bereft of humanity, considering a monkey’s exploration of an empty boat before careening itself into jungle-bound pirouettes, culminating in the digital nexus as the center of the hurricane kaleidoscope. Near the end, a road bends U-shaped through the camera’s gaze, and characters float in green-screened juxtapositions, taking the film’s playfulness to new heights.

I realize The Human Surge 3 won’t be for everyone, but to me, it’s one of the year’s most exciting pieces of cinema, a vision of the seventh art as the realm of never-ending invention. In such works, the future of the medium looks back at us and winks, hopefulness shines brighter than the sun. In his surges, Eduardo Williams radicalizes today and presents a tomorrow queered-up in all feasible meanings of the word. Free-falling into what’s to come, to sit and watch such an experiment is to regard the camera as a friend sharing its dream with us. Like one of the people lost within this screen-bound new real, I want to see magic happen. I want to dream - don't you?