Director: Felipe Baréa Prado
Writer: Felipe Baréa Prado
Cast: Bram van der Snel, Luca Turenhout, Michelle Maugeri
Running time: 30mins
Writer-director Felipe Baréa Prado’s debut short film manages to take on a huge number of issues, without becoming bogged down in details or thematically convoluted. From top-to-bottom, it is a well-realised and technically smart piece of work, which deserves a great deal of praise. Whether or not it lives up to its own billing.
Entered in Indy Film Library’s experimental category, Alles is OK follows Sylvan (a suitably clammy and panicked Bram van der Snel), a man who suffers from a mysterious mental illness, as he struggles to access the kind of healthcare that could actually help him live with his condition. Trapped in an eternal fight-or-flight by hearing a constant ‘inner scream’, he is also dogged by flittering visions of figures cloaked in black, prodding and pulling at vulnerable individuals around him.
The film commences with Sylvan sitting in what seems to be an actively hostile waiting room (plastered with posters assuring those seated there that life is great WHEN LIVED NORMALLY); a level of hostility which Sylvan’s unnamed case-worker (Luca Turenhout – who is wonderful at being infuriatingly dispassionate) seems only too happy to live up to. During their meeting, during which the gatekeeper to mental health services frostily informs Sylvan his condition is still not enough of a ‘priority’ to see a therapist, she also confirms his prescription to an addictive medicine foisted onto him to temporarily manage his condition is being withdrawn.
Sylvan holds his ground in the discussion – refusing to back down to the professional’s stony resolve. Clearly, she is used to simply having people agree with her as an ‘expert’ – so when Sylvan states that he never asked for the medication in the first place, but was given it as a holdover until he could receive actual treatment, she is left with nowhere to go. There are no more icy, self-assured retorts or patronising excuses of ‘doing our best’ left. Flailing for a last resort, she fumbles through a draw, and ends the conversation by thrusting another promotional poster into Sylvan’s hands. This one says: Laughing is the ultimate antidepressant, so laugh loudly!
It’s a wordless, witless way to end the conversation, but it gets the job done. After all, what else is there to say when your only point of access to mental health issues you the black spot like that? An asinine scrap of failed propaganda, whose meaning is so utterly unconvincing, so demonstrably low in effort, that it might as well read, “You’re fucked. Get lost.”
Abandoned to go cold turkey at the same time as contending with his inner demons, Sylvan retreats to his bedsit apartment. It’s here that Alles is OK flirts with becoming a conventional haunting horror – establishing a base-camp, where Sylvan can find a brief reprieve from the terrors of his daily life; but also, where those nightmares increasingly intrude, eroding our sense of security alongside his. Initially, this sees him try to manage his inner scream by taking refuge in horror films – something you might find odd, but makes for a nice nod to one theory about our obsessions with scary stories as a species: that they can serve as a way to inoculate us against the nightmares we encounter in our lived experience, or offer a safe space to confront themes that are troubling our minds.
In this case, however, Sylvan finds little respite in the genre – especially as the withdrawal symptoms kick in. Shivering and sweating, he takes matters into his own hands, making a last-resort call to a character unsubtly titled Kiko de drugsdealer (Michelle Maugeri). Mimicking the icy disdain of Sylvan’s case-worker, Kiko leaves Sylvan to sweat over whether she will give him access to her products at all, demanding coldly what he intends to do with it. When he mentions he is sick, and this might be his last chance, she chides that there is no such thing as a last chance – giving us a smart, minimalistic piece of world-building. This is a society where the state of social security has crumbled to such an extend that anyone with an inconvenient ailment will be driven to destructive self-medication, but also where the relentlessly positive mantras reinforcing dominant ideology, insisting Everything is Fine, are even distributed by the most exploitative of criminals.
In the end, Kiko deigns Sylvan worthy of her mercy. But, as he strives to live ‘normally’, or at least present as what his community defines as normal, by any means necessary, you might have guessed, things don’t necessarily get better from here on out. The horror just shifts focus, from the phantoms which may or may not be a figment of his mind, to the distinctly flesh-and-blood terrors of a Saturday night in a busy city.
Helping to highlight the transition between Sylvan’s various states of distress, special commendation goes to three of the crew in particular. The sound design of Ricardo Barrileiro does a fantastic job when it comes to blurring the lines between ‘reality’ and the content of Sylvan’s head, as well as building the environment when we can’t see all of it. Without the need for extensive establishing shots, we suddenly find ourselves in a cavernous metro station, or a park that stretches to the horizon – as well as foregrounding potential threats, giving us a slice of Sylvan’s constant worries that we are being talked about and targetted at every turn.
The colour-grading of Marina Tebechrani also stands out – painting the environment in different colours depending on the situation. While the park is coloured naturalistically, everything in his apartment becomes sickly shades of brown and yellow as his fears creep up on him – before a strobing spectrum of colour lights his room as panic really sets in. And even after he escapes into the night, Tebechrani’s palid and pale colours return to haunt him in the artificially lit streets after dark.
Finally, Danilo Miranda Cares’ camera brings a dynamism which helps underline the crumbling state of things. While things are stable and evenly framed in the beginning, a distinct shift to claustrophobic, hand-held footage comes as the situation really begins to unravel – lending an additional frenetic energy to procedings, which leaves us feeling that even as Sylvan finds a way to smile, the most disturbing moments of his experience might still lay in wait.
From what you’ve read, you may have gathered that Alles is OK is many things, then. A cleverly realised debut project, which proudly showcases bright talents throughout its cast and crew. A gripping psychological horror examining a sense of fatigue and anxiety many of us are well acquainted with, as a force for malignance. An unnerving pastiche of the ‘wellness culture’ which has been mainstreamed by governments and corporate interests that find genuine care to be an expense they would rather not fork out. A biting social satire about the economically imposed social murder targeted at the poor, the mentally ill and the disabled.
But an experimental film? That seems a harder case to make. There are not many places where it is ever unclear what is going on – whether it is real or not – and the film never slips into the meditative space people familiar with experimental film might expect. Then again, who the hell is to say what ‘experimental’ is, other than a subversion of form? Certainly, there is some subversion here – if only of a specific genre, rather than of all construction of meaning through the medium of film.
Baréa Prado does exceedingly well here to fight against the impulses to deliver a conventional horror – and is unapologetically unhurried in his delivery. He determinedly paces his film as a slow-burner, giving plenty of time for us to become accustomed to Sylvan’s status-quo, before moving the goalposts time and again to repeatedly circumvent our defences. Perhaps that is enough to label it as experimental.