A Couched Political Allegory For Our Deeply Troubled Times

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2019)

A couched political allegory of totalitarianism and the the capacity for humanity's total self-destruction in the classic sci-fi vein of "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers", it's no coincidence that it reflects (shimmers!) our current political malaise with vivid immediacy. Suffused with the iconic psychoanalytic texts of the shadow self and the"anima", it clearly wants to state how the fundamental and historical denial to look into the heart of our own darkness has created the figurative and literal cancer of contemporary human existence: biologically, environmentally, morally, spiritually.
The scenes of an affair ("you have no life") is the film's most potent insight into how we deny primal passions (no, I really do hate you!") to keep the artificial structures of society extant (marriage) which becomes more sharp thematically in the flashback scene when our loving couple, still sentient beings with their moral human conscience intact, make snide wisecracks about military heroism, the flag, the idea of a perfect God "who never makes mistakes" and The President of The United States, the casual mockery stimulating sexual arousal. In the end, there is a grand exorcism and a cleansing fire, but it's not assured: the capacity for the end of our species on earth remains in our inabililty to admit the eternal relation between Thanatos and Eros, which is in essence at the root of our inherent humanity, and our only chance for survival.
"The true is false, and the false has become true"-Guy Debord