Sundance Review: Users

Since the first wheel rolled, there has been one question about every technological development: what world will this create for our kids? In the age of rampant electronic communication and global trade on an unprecedented scale, that question is as sharp as ever, and it's the one posed in Sundance documentary Users.

Natalia Almada's global/self-portrait, which took the U.S. Documentary award at this week's festival, is gorgeous, and often fascinating, but rarely as profound as one might suppose. "Absolutely random, and yet in perfect equilibrium," she notes at one moment of strange harmony in her personal history, and that's the overall sensation of watching Users. A visual mosaic, scored by the Kronos Quartet, it's Almada's musings about what an increasingly technologically interconnected but personally disconnected world means for her growing son.

Almada's debt to Godfrey Reggio's Qaatsi films is not unique: most documentarians, it seems, are trying to be either Reggio, Louis Theroux, Errol Morris, or Barbara Kopple, and those are admirable footsteps in which to follow. She uses lengthy shots and juxtapositions, repetition and visual alliteration, but there is a Theroux-esque insertion of the personal through a narrative technique that touches on her core thesis: that technology is separating us from our own selves and each other, while inflicting quiet carnage on the world.

To support this, cinematographer Bennett Cerf undoubtedly captures images of serene beauty, even in chaos. Interspersed in these epic and often abstract images is Almada's boy, shown at every stage from infancy to game-playing tween. He's caught with an almost beatific luminescence, contrasting to the ragged geometry and sharp coloring that Cerf uses for landscapes and machinery. Rarely has the clash between the biological and technological been so sumptuously portrayed.

There's something being lost, Almada suggests: yet when she talks about humanity in the past, it's really about the era of her own childhood, not the whole human epoch. Is it technology she fears, or simply the loss of what she knows? Users, sumptuous as it is to look at, has little new to say about the bane and boon that is modern technology.

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Users
U.S. Documentary
World Premiere