Objectivity is nothing more than the fetish of truth.

Vanishing Waves
Kristina Buozyte 2012 Lithuania
Starring: Marius Jampolskis, Jurga Jutaite, Rudolfas Jansonas, Martina Jablonskyte, Darius Meskauskas

Lithuania is a country whose cinema I haven't encountered before so when I came across Kristina Buozyte's Vanishing Waves on Lovefilm/Amazon Prime I was both eager and cautious. One thing I really didn't expect however was that the film would be the oddest I've seen this year by quite a margin. At the heart of its story of the isolation inherent to modern society's increasing reliance on technology is a fascinating premise: the attempt of a group of scientists to connect the brain of one of their researchers, Lukas, to that of coma patient Aurora in the hope that their unconscious dreams will sync allowing him to communicate with her and hopefully bring her back to consciousness. The central problem though is that it's not ever really explained just how they're planning to do this and we're not given any details save for a sensory depravation tank, some computers and a clumsy spider web of wires in the shape of a mask. Buozyte's camera pirouettes and flows but on a storytelling level she doesn't have much to offer. The labs meanwhile are angular Gilliamesque monsters full of forensically shot details but stand in direct opposition to the wildly kaleidoscopic, sonically noisy reveries within Lukas and Aurora's minds, which as fantastically nightmarish as some of them are - the dinner date scene where a desperate Aurora, finding her feelings lacking, repeatedly crams food into her mouth until it bursts out then slashes her tongue with a steak knife stands out - never mine the disturbingly disorientating potential of their subject as fully as say Gaspar Noé's Enter The Void. The main opposition, both in terms of the plot and the viewer's entertainment, is Marius Jampolskis as Lukas. In the film he appears to function as a springboard for Buozyte to question the duplicity and self-serving nature of humanity but as a performer it's his personality that's in question. In a way his emotionlessness works - early on we see him rejecting sex with his lovely, understanding girlfriend in favour of jerking off to internet porn so his descent into a robotic detached preference for electronics over human contact is clearly signposted - but after a while he becomes wearying and woefully deficient as a leading man, only coming alive in his most violent or sexually aggressive fantasies. Things aren't helped by the fact that, as Aurora, Jurga Jutaite isn't given much to do. For half the film she's comatose (which is hardly her fault) and even when she's (ironically) most awake in the shared visions she hardly talks and is generally restricted to playing the seductress (a little too aloofly for her own good) and the damsel-in-emotional-distress (actually pretty good). There are exceptions like the aforementioned steak knife scene but not many. At its best the film is a brave, intelligent and fiercely unsettling attempt at freshness but it's hard to shake the feeling that much more could have been done with it. It's certainly unlike anything else but whether that's a good or a bad thing is up for debate.