First off, I really enjoyed this film. For the visuals, it has video game elements like “Run Lola Run - 1998”, also reminded me of “Kung Fury - 2015” in some ways.
The visuals are a kind of inverse retro futurism where items from the modern day are recontextualized in the past. The title card graphics are loading bands which were common in 80s 8bit home computers like the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and the like. The whole technology has a kind of late 80s and early 90s vibe.
Since this is a surrealist film, I need to start with a quote from the late great David Lynch: “I like a story that has structure but also holds abstractions” “the ways you make heads or tails of it is intuition” “abstractions give you room to dream” “it’s up to the people then to find their own interpretation, it doesn’t really matter what I think.”
So this is my interpretation of the film.
Spoilers ahead:
Spoiler
The world of the movie exists as a series of layers.
2035 world
Then the game world/virtual world of Psycobook
Ethiopia
MIT in 1997
It kind of reminds me of Dante's "Divine comedy" the levels of hell and then purgatory, where Gagano plays the part of Dante. In my head the movie plays in the middle of the story where Gagano is “in hell” and he slowly moves his way up from hell to purgatory to heaven.
The virus changes throughout the film. In the beginning it is very basic. It is a representation and mixture of red scare propaganda. Especially reminds me of “domino theory”, the virus also represents “the eastern bloc” in a way. Later in the film they say the virus is the Soviet Union, then Stalin, then the virus turns out to have masks of all world leaders, but then they say that the Soviet virus is not our enemy anymore after Stalin went missing. It also might represent the history of the soviet union. However, this does not explain the virus being able to take on masks of all the leaders of the world. In an abstract way the virus might represent "Chaos", "Change", "Metamorphosis", "Power", "Authority". In a literal sense it might be an actual virus (or a kind of AI/virus) that is able to mimic leaders to their own ends, as it was able to clone agent Gagano at the beginning of the film when he falls into a coma. Virus is also an AI, Instances of “revenge bait” style blackmail, interesting actually seen in IRL AI like with OpenClaw.
The entire movie exists in a dreamlike state. Things move very fluidly, there is no separation in "reality", "psycobook", "death", "psychosis", its all the same thing.
Even the ending is ambiguous.
In the psycobook world they wear a “mask” which is similar to the way “personas” work or worked on the early internet.
Love the stop motion, also reminds me of the animations from the PS1 era. Its interesting that they have this stop motion ascetic, at the beginning of the film, but after Gagano dies they no longer need to wear a mask and they no longer have this "stop motion" quality.
One funny thing about the first scene is that it implies that they are intruders in the Soviet guys house which reminds me of a historical theme where the Soviet’s where constantly being invaded or countries near them were being invaded. I think too there is a subtle theme of modern drone warfare where the military can kill someone and go back to eating a pizza like nothing happened like after the first scene.
There is a "theme of death" that hovers in the background of the entire film.
Firstly with the trope Gagano has of “I’m one day away from retirement” is foreshadowing his death. There is also a bit of the trope of “throwing the disabled person under the bus”. Since Gagano is not given a gas mask and his partner survives because he does have one.
Also playing chess comes up twice. Both as “the USSR being calculating” but also I think a subtle nod to “death playing chess” especially like from Ingmar Bergman's "The seventh seal”, and the kind of "theme of death".
The substance is how you escape but? The substance at the end is whatever they are being tested on, I think it might be DMT? This kind of follows the "theme of death". It also kind of reminds me of stargate project but also MK ultra. However, this does not explain how it is "colonizing the earth" as they say earlier. The substance is also shown as candy, and later as jello. Its also interesting that they say it is the thing that "that allows you to escape", because at the end in an almost cult-like way, they are "drinking the cool aid" before the cops can stop them. In the outermost layer of the worlds, it is the drug that they are being tested on.
I think too its interesting at the beginning that they are given a drug to enter "psycobook", but it is a different substance than "The substance".
Interestingly, Gagano who is a kind of 'true believer' of the CIA has a partner Palmer who is the opposite. He is just in it for himself. Palmer says at the beginning of the film. “Who cares about the future”, then goes on to steal his wife after Gagano dies. He seems to represent maybe Greed, or that drive of captial, the kind of all consuming greed, he is also very empty, he just wants things but not to use them more to have them. He treats Gaganos wife like an object instead of a person, and then he literally turns Gagano into an object. He plays both sides of the CIA and the virus to get what he wants. Even Gaganos wife has nothing good to say about him even though she sleeps with him.
The president of Ethiopia I think is the part I understood the least. He is both batman, but also the president? In a way he is also representative of the sort of post colonial African states "warlords" that exist or existed.
Mr sophistication. Italian? Italy invaded that part of etheopia in ww2 so maybe that’s a connection?
There is a longstanding rumor that the “Ark of the covenant” in Ethiopia, so it’s fun that they put it in the film. However, in the film it represents the source code, the source of all reality, being able to change reality.
Going back to "The Virus", its interesting that the copy is almost meant to get out meanwhile gagano is sent (Ethiopia) abandon psycobook cpu. It seems like this doesnt really do anything because he is still in a coma so there is nowhere for the copy to go to?
I think every character maybe represents an ideology slightly. Like Gagano is a working person trying to get by with his wife to "live the dream" of opening a pizza stand.
I think the old men “patriots” represent the previous generation. They have the same views of a aging population who believes that the system works fine but “they have a bad president” rather than the system itself being an issue. But they also represent wisdom and hope of a previous time. The old men said that he was the messiah (who will save them) and then the bug guy said that he thought he was Jesus until he saw agent Gaganos face. I.e. “The kingdom of God is not within one man or a group of men but all men".
The title literally describes the ending. It is ambiguous, but since Roy is Jesus in the experiment reality, you can either view it as "literally" Gagano dies and goes to heaven, or that they really are in an experiment and they are able to escape the experiment successfully.
I think this film can also be viewed backwards and also make sense as a man who has his life together and then gets stuck in an experimental reality where he slowly goes crazy until he is fully stuck in the hellscape of 2035.
Another kind of dialectic, the Gagano who sells pizza wants to be a secret agent with the CIA and the CIA Gagano wants to be a pizza salesman.
Ive been following this for years now. How it’s gotten into the zeitgeist that SKG was asking for perpetual support I’ll never know. They literally told them over and over again that they are not asking for perpetual support from studios, just an end of life plan of some sort. The commission didn’t listen.