The Human Surge

Eduardo Williams has steadily made a name for himself with a series of indelible shorts featuring young protagonists adrift in strange environments. In his debut feature, a prizewinner at Locarno, he takes the premise further, crafting a dreamlike three-part drama where youths from Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines are connected by invisible, electronic, or even subterranean means. Without clear demarcations between work and leisure, or public and private space, the camera itself seems at a loss to define its relationship to these figures: Are they documentary subjects? Narrative protagonists? Virtual avatars? The only constant is movement. The Human Surge’s thrilling horizontal jumps between disparate settings, tones, and palettes suggest the connective logic of the internet, making it all the more ironic that, in a sly riff on Beckett, the characters spend much of their time looking for a way online. Consistently inventive, The Human Surge burrows into three continents and finds surprising associations. –Max Goldberg