By Alonso Aguilar
Facial features are obscured by ominous hues as an enveloping drone drowns out all sound. Beyond these layers of audiovisual glitch, a young person caresses her facial features and extends her extremities with sensuous awe. Suddenly, the blue light soaking the frame implodes into a retro-futuristic font on a black text screen, where esoteric references about transmutation are intertwined with customary internet age exclamations. There’s a pervading eeriness that imbues the puzzling prose, yet a playful sense of wonder is also palpable; a promise for further entries that signals towards some kind of continuous process of self-discovery.
The message is signed by “lilaaa_”, the central figure (Simon Dalzell) of Kim Torre’s Atrapaluz / Suncatcher, a Costa Rican short film competing in the Pardi di Domani section at the 2021 edition of the Locarno Film Festival. From the opening scene, where she’s shown tidying up a mannequin in a disheveled room clustered between a myriad of anime posters and early 2000s electronics, her stoic demeanor denotes an underlying tenderness. The strokes as she brushes the plastic model’s wig are both delicate and attentive, qualities that also describe her dance moves while rehearsing a synth pop choreography on a distorted monitor.
In a way that mirrors herself, the environment that Lila inhabits envelops in a state of temporal and spatial displacement. Anachronistic technology is ever present in the corner of each frame, varnishing Atrapaluz’s universe with a neon tinge that subverts the grayish naturalism that tends to depict what passes as portraits of Latin American urban life. Here, the decaying city outskirts of late-capitalism are showcased matter-of-factly. They exist as a contextual anchor, and are seen through the same wide-eyed curiosity by which Lila experiences her everyday life, creating a subdued cyberpunk version of it. Nevertheless, the short film’s world has no place for canonical stylistic signifiers. Its retrofuturistic aesthetics are subtle enough to be fully integrated to a universe grounded in ordinariness, which amplifies the engrossing nature of its progressively ethereal atmosphere.
Precisely like that dystopian subgenre of science fiction, one of Torres’ main conceptual interests lies on the idea of transhumanism. Every glimpse Lila gets of her own reflection puts her in a state of deep introspection. Every other body she sees in motion, she inspects in almost ethnographical detail. The intermittent chat room text screens that are used as elliptical transitions, show her asking mysterious users about a previous life, a pursuit that begins to encompass every waking moment of her.
Given the initial homage to Japanese animation, references like Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost In The Shell (1995) and Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira (1988) immediately spring to mind. Analogous to the central concerns of those protagonists, for Lila technology also means a subversion of traditional identities. Through this liminal space between past and present, organic and synthetic, possibilities manifest themselves beyond the shackles of society’s pre-configured destiny. Suddenly, the extent of self-determination becomes fully configurable. The borders between all denominations diffuse into a state of pure essence; an engulfing blue light that washes over everything that was, in order to provide a way for what’s to come.
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Alonso Aguilar is a cultural journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He does editorial labor in Krinégrafo: Cine y Crítica and his writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Film International, photogénie, Cinema Year Zero, Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine, La Nación and Revista Correspondencias.
