Welcome to the Enclave
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Sarah Lasley
Genres: animation, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Two sisters try to defend their homemade virtual world from hackers who keep tagging it with garbage. A crowdfunding-pitch parody dressed up as a metaverse fever dream.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally a metaverse movie that gets the joke — the joke being that the metaverse is just a graffiti wall with a paywall. Lasley animates it like a panicked GoFundMe and that's the right register.
Sarah Lasley weaponizes the Kickstarter aesthetic against itself — sisters defending a homemade virtual world from taggers, packaged as a crowdfunding pitch. World of Tomorrow's structural confidence at a lower frame rate.
A Kickstarter aesthetic weaponized against itself — Sarah Lasley framing metaverse-defense as crowdfunding-pitch parody is a sharp formal joke, and animation is the right medium for that crossover.
Reviews
A delirious exploration of technological 'progress' that paints the metaverse as one large opportunity for chaos.