A retired professor travels into the Cuyamaca mountains and into Mount Shasta to search for a lost sect. He cannot drive out after his face becomes disfigured and his mental faculties fail, but he continues by accessing past recordings. His memories trace back to college hangouts and to an ex-wife who delivers old camcorder excerpts. A former friend, tied to the Church of Heaven's Light cult, had been found alone as a child and later died by suicide. The professor uses editing and multiple layers of recorded material, including vlogs and video calls, to build a narrative and suspense. Field research centers on an anomalous shipping container, while consultations add mathematical and anthropological speculation. The footage also appears contaminated by alien transmissions, intensifying dread and eschatological stakes.
"Our intrepid academic Devin (Asma) has bitten off more than he can chew, judging by the riverbed of bloodshot veins disfiguring his face and failing mental faculties that have left him unable to drive his car out of the wilderness. Still able to access his past recordings, he jogs his own memories about what led him out there in the first place: ex-wife Kate (Nicole Jones) dropping off old camcorder excerpts of college hangouts with pal Charlie (Keaton Asma), who recently killed himself."
"An orphaned member of the mysterious Church of Heaven's Light cult, as a child Charlie was found staggering out of the Cuyamacas alone but brought with him a wild cosmic pontification or two about superior beings stalking mankind. As head of the Buddha Jones marketing agency, who cut sharp trailers for Mother! and Hereditary among others, Asma knows his way around an edit, and so he generates a sharp narrative line and nagging suspense from Devin's nested jumble of vlogs."
"Venturing out solo, Devin's field research centres on an anomalous shipping container sat among the Cuyamaca's euclidean boulders; the mathematical and anthropological colleagues he consults with strew equally intriguing exposition and conjecture all around. If this bombardment of footage, Zoom calls and Facetime wasn't enough, Devin's documentary stash, when viewed, appears shot through with freaky alien transmissions."
"So overwhelming is the rush down an archival multimedia rabbithole that Asma rather loses the the opportunity to use Blair Witch-style pacing to accentuate the dre"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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