Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Johannes Grenzfurthner
Starring: Ethan Haslam, Katharina Rose
I recently received a press release alerting me to the upcoming release
of a "podcast movie." What on Earth is a podcast movie? Turns out it's
simply a feature length audio drama. How is that a movie? By the most
basic definition, a movie must consist of moving pictures. Wait, what
about Derek Jarman's Blue, which features audio played over a blue screen for its duration?
Sorry Jarmanites, not a movie. What if a film features moving pictures
that don’t add anything to the storytelling? Well that describes an
awful lot of the films that have ever been made, and today's crop of
Hollywood movies are increasingly reliant on dialogue over images as a
means of storytelling. Is
Spider-Man: No Way Home, which mostly features characters spouting exposition in a series of
bland rooms, as much of a movie as Raiders of the Lost Ark? They're both technically movies, but only one could really call
itself a Movie, the other is just a TV episode that happened to play in
cinemas.
Director Johannes Grenzfurthner's
Masking Threshold features moving pictures throughout.
Many of them are beautifully captured and some of them are genuinely
repulsive, but they don’t really play much of a role in the
storytelling. That task is given over almost wholly to a voiceover
narration delivered by the film's nameless protagonist (Ethan Haslam), whose face is never seen but whose voice is heard throughout.
That narrator is an IT worker cursed with tinnitus who takes it upon
himself to cure himself of his affliction. Taking unscheduled time off
work and shutting himself away in a backroom of his home, he attempts to
get to the bottom of what is causing the constant ringing in his ears.
To do this he recreates sound using various objects and analysing what
difference, if any, their presence makes to the noise in his ears. His
observations are peppered with rants on various topics, from organised
religion to his hatred of crowded spaces.
While his narrator babbles away, Grenzfurthner presents us with images
of his working environment, often captured in some impressive macro
photography. But regardless of the images presented, we're forced to
hang on the narrator's every word to keep up with the narrative. The
images are secondary to the verbal narration. You could turn off the
picture and still follow the plot, but if you turned off the sound the
images would leave you baffled. This is anathema to the very concept of
cinema, and whether you can stick with
Masking Threshold will depend on how devoted you are to
the notion of cinema as a visual medium.
Even taken as an audio drama with accompanying images,
Masking Threshold will likely test your patience. It's all
too predictable where the increasingly unstable narrator is headed with
his experiment, i.e. down the route taken by every mad movie scientist.
The feature length simply isn't justified for a story that could have
just as easily been told as a far less gruelling short.
It doesn't help that the narrator is one of the most unpleasant
protagonists of recent years, and that we're forced to listen to his
deranged rants for the duration of the movie. Things take a particularly
grim turn when he begins chopping up and torturing insects and slugs,
which will no doubt prove the turning point for a lot of viewers. In
both its storytelling technique, its disturbing images and irritating
protagonist, from which there is no escape,
Masking Threshold is as uncomfortable as a "movie" gets. I
don't know who I could recommend this to.
