REVIEW: ‘Users’ documentary is poetic response to changing world
Photo: Users is a cinematic look at how technology impacts humanity. Photo courtesy of Icarus Films / Provided by Cinema Tropical with permission.
The new documentary Users, from filmmaker Natalia Almada and Icarus Films, is a poetic, dreamlike essay that combines images both personal and universal. There is no strict plot to the film — no finite characters, no overarching heroes-and-villains storyline. Instead, Almada immerses viewers in the middle of the changing world, offering commentary on how relationships and personal lives are being augmented by technology and destruction.
What results from Almada’s deep dive into these heady topics is a beautifully realized cinematic document that wouldn’t feel out of place in a modern art museum. The artistic display of these images — from workers on a factory line to the crashing waves of the ocean — is intended to have the audience ponder the realities of the 21st century. There is such beauty in the world, yet there’s also simultaneous degradation and spoilage. How can planet Earth support both the innocence of a newborn child and tons of plastic, garbage and hardware? How can someone parent a child and not have the relationship succumb to a mediated exchange via AI and social media?
Almada, who also dabbles in fiction, doesn’t provide clear-cut answers to her questions, which is appropriate. She’s after something more elemental than an easy fix or a political pushback on the current state of affairs. She almost wants the viewer to fall in love again with the potentiality of the planet and the power of humanity, and she does this by showing recklessness up against hopefulness.
For some audience members, especially those untuned to the flourishes of indie film, the refusal of Almada and her team to follow the dictates of a certain genre can be confounding and frustrating. For others, especially those who yearn for something different for their cinematic appetite, Users is a thought-provoking, even provocative look at the world that billions of people inhabit. The fact that it’s not cookie cutter is one of its strongest attributes.
Much credit should be given to the Kronos Quartet, who offer a complementary score that is elegiac and haunting, building tension and quickly brushing it away. Almada is skilled at using these musical notes to help tell her story-less story. She builds crescendoes with the images, which are nicely accented by Kronos’ work, and then all of a sudden she’ll have a hard cut to something solitary, something stable, something stationary, something silent, and then she’ll start building again to the top of the narrative mountainside. It’s a masterful cinematic stroke, a director in full control of image and sound.
Users asks some deep questions about technology and human relationships, a topic that many artists explore in their work, but there’s something original in Almada’s documentary, which won high praise at the Sundance Film Festival. She wants to know not only if technology is destroying what makes humans human, but she also wants to know if it’s replacing that humanity with something different. Children need to be raised by someone (or something), and is technology filling that space? That’s a scary thought in many ways, and she convincingly shows that the future is here. Children have a strong connection to an ever-connected world of buttons and customized programming, so much so that they may forget the loving parent standing behind them, no doubt horrified by the sudden, perhaps inevitable, transformation of the family dynamic.
Can the evolution / devolution that Almada documents be stopped? Or is it too far gone?
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Users, directed by Natalia Almada, opens today, June 16, at the Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles. Rating: 
Click here for more information and tickets.
