The Eggregores' Theory
2024 · 16m · Italy
Directed by Andrea Gatopoulos
Genres: drama, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In a dystopian future where language itself has become the vector of a devastating illness, an unnamed narrator reflects on his past and a doomed relationship amid book burnings and the destruction of archives, told through monochrome AI-generated imagery.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Language as plague vector, told through AI glitch-aesthetics and a narrator mourning books—this is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus critics squirm, and Gatopoulos leans into the discomfort rather than resolving it, which is precisely why it works.
The monochrome AI imagery sits in uneasy dialogue with the literary archive at the film's heart, a formal paradox that recalls Marker's photo-essay experiments and suggests a deliberate conversation about how we document loss in an age of algorithmic reproduction.
The decision to let the AI-generated visuals remain visibly artificial—never trying to pass as 'real'—transforms what could be a gimmick into the film's emotional core: a narrator alienated from language speaking through a medium that has no language to begin with.
Reviews
This is never more painfully obvious than in the acceptance of the new normal that both the narrator and his former love heartbreakingly share. It's a very clever use of the uneasiness of AI-generated imagery in portraying an unsettling dystopian vision that is not devoid of its own nightmarish beauty.