We Might as well be dead

Natalia Sinelnikova’s We Might As Well Be Dead, which made its premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Festival, is an acerbic satire that aims for a variety of targets, all of which will hit home for viewers. This impressively self-assured debut shares DNA with other films that use self-contained communities as metaphors, such as High Rise and REC, but carves a niche all its own.  This is without a doubt the best COVID-adjacent film I’ve seen, touching on the fears and anxieties we’ve shared (some of us more than others, as the film astutely points out) during the pandemic.  It can be tricky to convince audiences to sit through a film which dramatizes traumatic events that are still fresh in the memory.  Movies that have been more overtly about the pandemic have struggled in this way, to varying degrees—see The Bubble (or rather, don’t), Malcom and Marie, and so on. Sinelnikova smartly sidesteps these movies’ flaws by avoiding the claustrophobic tedium inherent in pandemic tales and relying on subtext to make her case rather than unimaginatively just vomiting onto the screen what we all have already been living through.

The film centers on the St. Phoebus housing community, located somewhere in Germany. Anna (Ioana Iacob, restrained and simmering) is the de facto right hand of the community’s leadership. She serves as the security guard, keeping the community safe, and also delivers droll announcements about upcoming events as well as the weather forecast. For reasons that are never fully made clear, the community residents are deathly afraid of the outside world. A security gate and border fence line the perimeter, and potential new residents must answer a series of questions before they can even be considered for admittance. Have they experienced any mental or physical changes in the last two weeks? Have they ever been evicted for committing an “unsocial, immoral, or inconsiderate act”? And so on. Soon, a dog goes missing in the tower block, and Anna’s daughter Iris (Pola Geiger), who is undergoing a self-imposed quarantine in their bathroom, insists that she’s the cause, that she has the Evil Eye. From there, suspicions mount in the community, and Anna and the other residents find themselves doing whatever it takes to stay alive.

A steadily mounting sense of dread permeates the film, accentuated by the cinematography, which is stark and beautiful.  The forest surrounding the tower is ominous and still, something out of a Grimm fairy tale, and the tower itself evokes a hospital with its sterile white walls and parquet floors. This is a cold, uninviting world. Punctuating the dread are moments of humor, ranging from the low-key absurd—in one scene, Anna takes a bath by sitting in a bucket and placing her arms and legs in smaller buckets beside her on the floor, softly muttering, “I’m an octopus”—to the pitch black. Suffice it to say, this is not a film for animal lovers, but there’s one darkly funny moment involving a dead marten that made me laugh out loud. And I say this as someone who has a very low tolerance for animal cruelty in films. When the T. Rex lifts its head revealing the dog’s collar on its tooth in Jurassic Park: The Lost World, I cried.  (I was 10, but still.)

The parallels between St. Phoebus and our world are uncanny, and only become more apparent as events unfold. There’s the aforementioned isolation of the tower itself, and Iris’s self-imposed lockdown, which will likely trigger flashbacks to 2020. At one point, the community holds a dance, and the dancers hold each other with hesitation and endearing awkwardness, almost as if they’re unaccustomed to (or afraid of) human touch. As tensions escalate in the film, battle lines are drawn, and some of the residents form a neighborhood watch of sorts, patrolling the grounds. The image of angry, scared white people patrolling a golf course brandishing golf clubs is perhaps a tad on the nose, but effective. I couldn’t help but think of our former Cheeto-In-Chief and his Mar-a-Lago acolytes.

It’s not only the fear of the outside world that mounts, but fear of each other, as well. It’s sadly inevitable that Anna eventually finds her position not quite as unassailable as she thought.  It doesn’t’ matter that she’s kept the building safe for years and has impeccable morals. She consistently refuses bribes from building applicants and scolds them for doing so. Her sin is that she’s Romanian, and Jewish, and so is regarded as ‘other’ by the long-term residents. At one point, in response to Anna’s pleas, the building manager delivers a retort that could easily be the film’s tagline: “Feeling safe is just as important as safety itself.” It doesn’t matter what the goals are or what people are trying to accomplish.  What matters is the theater of self-defense, the actions we take to insulate ourselves from threats, regardless of whether they’re real or perceived.

The narrative’s slow burn builds to a fever pitch in the climax, as Anna must reckon with the increasingly monstrous actions of both her neighbors and herself. The final scene is devastating and the last shot of the film lands with a gut punch. Sinelnikova, herself a refugee, has drawn on her personal experience to weave a masterful dystopian tale here, with razor-sharp social commentary.  This is definitely an uncomfortable movie to watch, its plot beats and character developments depressingly familiar. This is definitely a cynical film, though it lacks the aggressive nihilism of, say, High Rise. The film also smartly highlights the xenophobia and racism that were amplified by the pandemic (“Wuhan flu,” anyone?).  This is very much a film ‘of the moment,’ yet it also seems to be heralding a new age.  This is a cautionary tale for those of us who’ve prematurely heralded the end of the pandemic and its related ills. We may have conquered the virus, more or less, but the steps that we’ve taken to keep ourselves safe have led to a sharp divide—between those who are safe in the housing communities and the less fortunate who find themselves on the outside looking in.