A housing council reigns over a dystopia in the quirky satire ‘We might as well be dead’. The film follows Anna (Ioana Iacob), a single mother and security guard whose role in her high-rise home is to interview and introduce candidates for new housing. The film doesn’t specify what kind of apocalypse made the residence in the skyscraper so prestigious, but the new applicants treat their decision as a matter of life or death, begging on all fours for refuge.
Anna was not born into the community she now calls both home and employer. She’s not a perfect citizen by the council’s standards. She is a single mother and her daughter, Iris (Pola Geiger), has begun to show signs of faltering under the pressures of closed society, hiding out in the apartment bathroom full time. Anna’s precarious position in the building is further threatened when a neighbor’s dog goes missing and an atmosphere of paranoia sets in in the community. Anna tries to convince her neighbors that the dog’s absence is an accident rather than a conspiracy, but her efforts are met with growing frenzy and the mob soon begins to turn against her.
Director, Natalia Sinelnikova, exudes a sense of dread through angled angles and harsh lighting. The camera is often placed below the faces of the actors, looking at them from perspectives that seem out of place. When the camera pulls back, the inhabitants of the skyscraper appear to be crammed into the doorways and the long, tapering hallways. The images are cleverly crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegorical ambitions are continually thwarted by another neighborhood grievance.
We might as well be dead
Unclassified. In German, with subtitles. Duration: 1h33. In theaters.
