Satan’s Mirror
2021 · 13m · Canada
Directed by André Desrochers
Genres: documentary, essay film, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
Ecosystem loss was already being predicted in the 1930s, decades before broad public awareness. The film explores that foresight together with an extraordinary proposal to move water from rapids to Mars to preserve humanity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1930s ecological prophecy married to a Mars water-preservation scheme—it's exactly the kind of conceptual collision that makes consensus critics squirm, and Desrochers leans into the vertigo instead of resolving it. Most filmmakers would sand down the surreality; he weaponizes it.
The essay-documentary hybrid sits within a lineage of structural cinema and speculative non-fiction, though the tonal register—contemplative yet provocative—risks diffusing rather than deepening its interrogation of foresight and futurity. Formally deliberate, but the argument doesn't quite crystallize.
The conceptual architecture is audacious, but what actually *lands* is the decision to intercut historical warning signs with speculative infrastructure—a formal choice that forces the viewer to hold contradiction in real time without editorial intervention. That restraint is what elevates it.