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If you’re not into virtual reality, you may need time to adjust to the visual environment of this documentary feature by French filmmakers Ekiem Barbier, Builhem Causse, and Quentin L’Helgouac’h, since it all takes place within the computer game DayZ, specifically the titular post-apocalyptic “place” within the game where zombies roam and the once civilized landscape is returning to nature. The filmmakers’ avatars are dressed in combat gear and flak vests with the word “Press” stenciled on them. They wander around trying to interview gamers who have formed groups of their own. These groups may have purposes within the scope of the game, but the trio’s mission is to go beyond the game’s “story” to find out how and why these people have left “real life” to socialize within a virtual world with people they will never meet face-to-face. It’s a tricky proposition, especially given the fact that, basically, DayZ is a violent game and everyone is carrying guns that can “kill” you. If it seems as if I’m laying the scare quotes on thick, the problem in describing the doc is that the rules of the game are never laid out and so it’s difficult to get a purchase on the logic of its appeal as a pastime before you need to address it as a venue where people live second lives.

This surreal aspect is made apparent right from the start. The first encounter the three “journalists” make is with a vigilante crew called Dark As Midnight, whose philosophy is gleefully nihilistic. “What do we value?” says the nominal leader, a woman with a North American accent. “I don’t give a fuck.” As Barbier talks to the masked woman and her acolytes, a half-naked male prisoner they call “the princess” lies on a table waiting to be tortured, presumably. Though it’s obvious the members of the group are taking the piss with regard to Barbier’s questions about their moral purview, their idea of “fun” is to kill, and that’s why they’re there. “It’s a playground,” one points out. At the other end of the intention spectrum is a religious cult that worships a god called Dagoth headed by a cowboy-hatted “reverend” who we eventually learn is a Finnish massage therapist in real life. Over the course of the movie, which represents 963 hours of the filmmakers’ presence on the island, they will encounter the reverend several times, extracting more about his relationship to the game and why he spends so much time here. “It’s good to disappear,” he says at one point, though he’s keenly aware that he can be usurped by VR and lose himself. A husband-and-wife team, who are based in Berlin and mostly visit the game to surround themselves with the kind of nature they used to enjoy when they lived in Australia, can be heard tending to an unseen child back in their apartment as they explain why they spend every waking hour in DayZ when they are not at work. Another man, a Canadian transplanted to South Africa, describes the game as something akin to “my local pub,” a pastime within a pastime. 

The prosaic responses to the trio’s puzzled inquiries about the nature of these participants’ involvement in the game indicate a desire for a new way to connect with others. Much of the “filming” was done during the pandemic, and some of the journalists’ interlocutors are under lockdown back in their homes (which are suggested at the end with actual footage of views from their windows). Knit’s Island thus also becomes literally a place to escape to. At one point, several of the people with whom the trio has made friends accompany them to find the edge of the island, which is featureless, just endless rolling hills of grass. The creators of the game have obviously thought of everything, including the infinitude of space. Despite the movie’s title, no game is an island. 

In English and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Knit’s Island home page in Japanese

I would rate this debut feature more highly if the English title had been Hooray for Hell, because it better fits the idiosyncratic tone of the film. The protagonists are a pair of high school girls whose friendship is initially deceptive. Both Na-mi (Oh Woo-ri) and Seon-woo (Bang Hyo-rin) are victims of school bullies, though we eventually learn that the latter used to be tormented by the former before the former herself became a target. During a humorously botched suicide attempt, Seon-woo tells Na-mi that their mutual tormentor, Chae-rin (Yung Yi-ju), has moved with her family to Seoul due to the father’s bankruptcy. Nevertheless, the skinny on the street is that Chae-rin is doing even better than ever, and is planning to go overseas to study. Hearing of this, Na-mi loses it and decides to postpone her self-obliteration in order to get back at Chae-rin before she skips the country, and enlists Seon-woo in her scheme even though she still hasn’t worked out the details. 

When they arrive in Seoul they discover that their nemesis has actually joined a Christian cult. She’s already confessed to and repented for her cruelties, and in fact welcomes her former classmates for the opportunity to be punished and forgiven by them. Consequently, Na-mi’s and Seon-woo’s dreams of revenge are deflated, leaving them in a mental quandary: How to gain satisfaction from someone who may still deserve their enmity but isn’t fazed by it. The kicker is that they are still bent on somehow sticking it to Chae-rin and hang around under the pretense of perhaps joining the cult until the other shoe drops, which it eventually does with an enormous crash after they learn that the cult is a money-making scam, at which point the movie turns into a frantic horror thriller.

Hail to Hell betrays the typical plot inconsistencies and unsteady comic tone of a debut feature, but the writer-director, Lim Oh-jeong, seems so immersively steeped in the culture of bullying that she’s able to gain considerable mileage from a premise that’s been done to death, especially in Korea, mostly by constantly keeping the story moving in unexpected directions. It may not be the last cinematic word on the social dynamics of bullying, but it’s certainly the most original. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

Hail to Hell home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Korean Film Council

The Latin title translates as “The Fabric of the Human Body,” a somewhat poetic take on a topic that’s literally visceral, meaning it’s about actual viscera. A previous documentary by the directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel covered Issei Sagawa, the man who famously killed and partially ate a woman in France, and their latest offering, filmed in a French hospital, is equally obsessed with getting up-close-and-personal with the guts of the matter as it’s mostly about what’s revealed inside of us as the body undergoes surgical procedures that are by definition intrusive. At the same time, and perhaps by design, the movie underscores the precarity of the French health care system, which we learn is distressingly underfunded and understaffed, thus intensifying the dramatic elements of the operations with the suggestion that the surgeons don’t always know exactly what they’re doing.

The filmmakers’ approach is both disarmingly simple and purposely overbearing. Surgical procedures are depicted in closeup with the soundtrack capturing the give-and-take among the medical personnel involved, and if sometimes the jargon gets a bit thick, the conversational tone indicates unmistakably the moment-to-moment temperament of the doctors and nurses, which can veer widely from carefree to panicked and back again. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel seem to have chosen the most wince-inducing procedures—an eyball being sliced open to insert a new lens, a penis’s urethra being drilled by a device set to what the surgeon refers to as the “Kalishnikov setting”—as if to drive home the notion that this is what these professionals have to deal with every day, often for hours at a time, so it’s no wonder they become inured to the damage inflicted. At one point, a medical technician, complaining of the hospital’s “downsizing” policy, remarks on his colleagues’ “carpe diem attitude toward life,” and the line becomes a leitmotif. “It’s kind of a game,” one surgeon says about the decisions he has to make while his hands are wrist-deep in someone’s bowels (“a plumbing problem”); while another, caught in a rare moment of self-doubt, reflects on the pointlessness of extending lives. A discussion over a removed and in tact breast indicates the limits of oncology as a diagnostic enterprise. “Chemotherapy ruined it,” someone says, to which another person replies, “That’s gynecology for you.”

With regard to this kind of contrast, the most dramatic scene depicts a Caesarean, which combines the frantic (“I can’t feel the sac”) and the ecstatic (“My kitten!” exclaims the nurse when the baby finally cries). De Humani is rarely beautiful, given the context of its visual explorations, but it is often wondrous in its mission to chart as much fleshly territory as possible. That the filmmakers relate the corporeal to the emotional so effectively signals a desire to get at the existential dilemma of medical science. For all the expertise on display the human form’s job is to decay, an aspect that is highlighted by ongoing shots of two elderly and cognitively impaired women navigating the halls of a hospital together, seemingly on their way to nowhere. It’s not exactly a revelation that we’ll all be joining them at some point, but given the setting these scenes exert a profound power.

In French. Opens Nov. 22 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

De Humani Corporis Fabrica home page in Japanese