Video Vision (2024)

Video Vision had its international première at FrightFest 2024, 24 August

”The past may be behind you, but it still has all the answers. You just have to shine a light on it. It’s like a cheat sheet for life, because humans have been doing the same thing forever.”

So says middle-aged Rodney (Shelley Valfer) to his millennial employee Kibby (Andrea Figliomeni). Rodney owns ‘Video Vision’, once a video rental store, and now a cluttered Brooklyn workshop where he restores old analogue equipment and transfers recorded materials from and to different formats. Rodney surrounds himself with the past, while understanding the need to update and upgrade it. Accordingly Michael Turney’s low-budget feature drips with nostalgia for the cheesy, straight-to-video practical effects of the pre-digital Eighties, and for the imperfect, mis-tracking media through which they were typically viewed – but it is equally concerned with more post-millennial issues, as Kibby negotiates her developing relationship with customer Gator (Chrystal Peterson).

Their banter game is good, the attraction is certainly there, but Kibby is a cis, heterosexual woman, while Gator is a pre-op transsexual man. She is confused and not a little fearful, he is hung up on a body he cannot stand and a history he would rather put forever behind him. Gator makes the analogy explicit: just as recorded data, when digitised, remains essentially the same same even as its form changes, so he remains the same person even as he undergoes transition – for he is already a boy, just packaged in the wrong body. Yet Kibby is professionally incapable of ignoring, and insistent upon respecting, original formats, even as she transfers their contents to newer media. Here we have a metaphor whose vehicle and tenor (digitisation and transition, or vice versa) are so closely intertwined that they become impossible to disentangle.

There is a third strand to this technometaphysical romance. Dumped outside the workshop, a smelly old Unitronx VHS Video Cassette Recorder is in fact encoded with the malign spirit of Dr Analog (Hunter Kohl), a half-cartoon, half-real, part Max Headroom-like, part Freddy Krueger-esque digiphobe who is slowly taking possession of Kibby as the vessel through which he will be reincarnated in our world. “Look, I’ve accepted I’m male,” observes Gator, “maybe you should accept the fact that you’re turning into an obsolete entertainment device” – and so Gator’s body dysmorphia plays out alongside Kibby’s body horror, with either one complementing and amplifying the other. Kibby is even being taken over by a man, and so experiencing something like what Gator feels – except that here Kibby is becoming the replaceable format for someone else’s data (rather than the ghost in the machine).

All this allows Turney to reappropriate motifs from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Steve Lisberger’s Tron (1982), the Eighties slasher and even – in the regendered final line – Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back (1980). For like Jackson Stewart’s Beyond the Gates (2016), Graham Skipper’s Sequence Break (2017) and Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford’ The Last Video Store (2023), Video Vision looks back – through lo-res POV shots, colour-coded key lighting and retrofuturist proto-CGIscapes – to the stylings, sensibilities and synth-driven scores of a decade “when”, as Gator puts it, “everything was awesome and nothing made sense.” Meanwhile, like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), this explores trans identity and the politics of otherness through nostalgia in negative. It is also charming, funny and – for all its lo-fi low stakes – winningly weird, as it recovers unexpected answers from the past to present problems.