On the face of it, Solos displays all the symptoms of a standard “pandemic” product. A short-film anthology. Multiple directors. Single-location stories. Real-time soliloquies. A diverse cast of Hollywood stars. And science fiction.
But there is more to Solos than its format. Created by David Weil, who is also written five and directed three of the seven episodes, the sci-fi anthology uses the quarantine-filmmaking formula to uncanny effect. Each of the stories is set in the foreseeable future, but the resonant theme of isolation haunts the spatial palettes. The innovative world-building remains in service of a timely central question: What does it mean to be human? The disparate set of characters – dealing with guilt, grief, loneliness, paranoia, disorientation, and ageing – evoke the closest thing there is to an answer.
I, for one, was moved by the startling intimacy of the stories and their stream-of-consciousness performances, all of which are loosely connected even when they are not.
The order is not random. But as is the case with anthologies, some moments uncover larger wounds than others. Given the production parameters, the verbal exposition, and introspective rambling can wear down the most patient of viewers. Some actors pull it off, but not every problem can be acted out of.
Here then is a ranking of the seven episodes of Solos from worst (or maybe “least best”) to best.
*Warning: spoilers ahead*
TOM
It is no bad deal when an entire short revolves around Anthony Mackie conversing with Anthony Mackie. But Tom has the distinct disadvantage of not just following a terrific segment but also adopting the extended language of a cancer therapy session. (The sterile sofas do not help). The film indulges in a lot of sparring (‘tomfoolery’) before coming to the point. (All segments do this, which I suppose is the whole point of narrative conceit).
It opens with a man at odds with his clone, regretting the $ 60,000 fee for this “service." We begin to understand that Tom is a dying man ‘programming’ his AI imitation to replace him in his soon-to-be-bereaved family. Tom settles into the meeting and reminisces about his wife and two kids, conveying the kind of ‘inner’ details to the robot that cannot be encapsulated by a docket. The idea is sweet, but undeniably autocratic and creepy: Tom wants his family to embrace a synthetic ‘remake’ of himself so that... his wife does not love anyone else? His kids do not move on? Mackie does his best, but the futility of this premise is laid bare in the next short.
PEG
Midway through Peg, it is revealed that the old protagonist is Tom’s daughter: She speaks of the time her father died of cancer, and her mother lived with a robot clone, but it “just wasn’t the same." The mother died too, and Peg was shipped away to Britain to her grandmother – a detail meant to justify the actress’ distinctly English accent.
Most of us would pay good money to watch Helen Mirren go solo in a space-crunched chamber drama with the camera fixed tightly on her face. Peg is just her jogging through the wilderness of her memories leading up to this moment in a spaceship. Mirren’s face is like one of those old-school theatre screens on which vivid black-and-white films with operatic scores are projected before the curtain comes down. It conveys a history of living, a leap of faith and fate – the full anatomy of a situation that compels a woman to spend the twilight of her life in a flight to nowhere. Mirren defies the coherence, but the arc of existential enlightenment has a clear sense of direction. David Bowie’s Space Oddity saves the day. Peg of course is trying to reach 'Major Tom.'
SASHA
Sasha, starring Uzo Aduba, is the only film whose premise is a direct consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. A woman in her 20th year of lockdown in a secure-living facility suspects that her automated ‘stay counsellor’ is trying to evict her. Sasha was 23 when she signed up to be sheltered from the virus in one of the company’s hi-tech luxury bunkers, but the 43-year-old is now the last remaining citizen of this community. She is so disconnected from reality that she has converted the space into a dream home – complete with a farm kitchen, floor to ceiling windows, and an ‘outdoor’ living room. Most of the film is centered on Sasha arguing with the polite bot and descending into a frantic state of denial.
The conflict is tragicomical: A human has escaped so hard that she is unfit to confront the prospect of freedom. The virus is gone, but the fear has stayed. In a way, Sasha’s Stockholm syndrome is reminiscent of Brooks from The Shawshank Redemption, a veteran prisoner who finds himself hopelessly unprepared to face the truth of the outside world. The film is a creative reminder of the mental health epidemic that awaits us on the other side of this pandemic. Aduba keeps Sasha honest despite the monotony of her rant, but the high-pitched climax sacrifices personality at the altar of imagination: This is the only chamber drama in which we actually see a memory.
JENNY
Jenny is deliberately random and eccentric for three-quarters of its length, running the risk of disengaging the viewer. Constance Wu is very Constance Wu-ey, delightfully drunk, mercurial, funny, and unpredictable; a young woman in a mysterious waiting room speaking directly into the camera. She is dressed as an angel, jokes about her marriage, describes her ‘hot neighbour,’ and his adorable kid whom she babysits. We wonder where this is heading, until Jenny realises where she really is: A room between life and death, following a car accident minutes after experiencing a dramatic miscarriage at a kiddie birthday party. The symbolism is stunning. Evidently, her monologue has been wonky because Jenny’s memories are being uploaded: Wu is essentially enacting the process of finding and losing her identity, bearings, missing chapters, and flitting through pages of frivolous context to arrive at the truth.
It is like watching a human glitching in real time – a sort of eternal sunshine of a ‘spotted’ mind – which makes it a deceptively complicated and poignant performance. The revelation has Wu hitting us with a thousand bricks, seamlessly changing track and melting into a stirring tragedy. Just as we put one foot out the door, the nonsense morphs into an avalanche of sense.
STUART
The long-running Hollywood joke of Morgan Freeman playing God is reframed as Stuart, a sentimental and smart story of a dementia-afflicted old man whose memories are in fact not his own. The segment opens with Otto, a young man who visits Stuart in the guise of an NHS worker hoping to regenerate the pensioner’s broken mind. Freeman, like Constance Wu’s Jenny, navigates the difficult task of essaying a human computer that gets rebooted: The memories come flooding back, and he expresses the joy of a blind man blessed with the power to see again. Midway through Stuart, however, the ‘twist’ suggests that Otto is a son looking for the man who had stolen from him the memories of his late mother. Stuart’s reason – he stole others’ memories to rid himself of his own – is predictable but deeply affecting. This makes for an unsettling viewing experience. Stuart initially narrates parts of previous segments – Tom’s memory of his wife, Peg’s memory of the boy she crushed on, Sasha’s memories of her sister, and so on – which are later revealed to be stolen memories. This also explains Freeman’s voiceover opening each of the seven segments: not a ‘God voice’ gimmick but a logical thread.
The short becomes a disarming metaphor for the act of film-watching itself: Most of us escape into the big screen, immersed in the lives of perfect strangers and fictional characters to temporarily rid ourselves of our own memories. Stuart stole and stole until his mind collapsed – a condition visually depicted through the postcard-like setting of the film — a sofa on an endless beach.
NERA
A snowstorm rages in Wisconsin, a curfew is declared, and a pregnant woman buckles down for the weekend. Subtle cutaways of the house reveal that her bloated belly is the result of a futuristic IVF technique. Suddenly, she goes into labour. She gives birth, the gooey baby popping out into her outstretched hands. Everything feels accelerated, like life liquidating itself to fit the fluid shape of one weekend. What follows is an unnerving but oddly profound stretch of modern-day storytelling.
Nera wears the chilling urgency of a horror movie – “the woman in the cabin” – and is shot through the lens of visual suspense. Yet, horror is nothing but the physicality of human truth. Nera’s baby is no ordinary infant. Every time a scene transitions, he ages five years. By the end, his body is that of a young man but his mind remains that of an infant. The optical illusion is a striking ode to the spiritual dissonance of parenthood. Actress Nicole Beharie, as Nera, owns the entangled trauma of a mother struggling to defy her inherent instinct. A scene where she narrates a story – her own – to the growing child plays out like a dark lullaby, lending context to a fairytale that ends way after its closing credits. Imagine this: When the blizzard clears, an old man takes his final breath in the arms of his young mother.
LEAH
At one point in the Zach Braff-directed Leah, three Anne Hathaways – two of them on computer screens – are hyperventilating at once. The protagonist is in 2024, and she is arguing with her 2029 and 2019 avatars. This may sound like a flimsy time-travel punchline. But believe me when I write: the 30-minute-long Leah has the power to break full-grown humans into a million little pieces, and turn them into impossible puzzles. I was ugly-sobbing by the end of Leah, a wondrous and whimsical ode to the crippling toll of caregiving. It opens all goofy with Leah, an obsessive physicist on her 1,227th day of creating a time-travel contraption in her mother’s basement. She records yet another failure and launches into a playful pop-cultural tirade: Trump has fled to Russia, and time-travel is still a “boys’ club” (“Is 13 Going On 30 all we have?”). It is also established that Leah’s mother is withering from ALS in a beige hospital room. When Leah makes her breakthrough, the floodgates open: Why does she want to teleport into the future? Is it to find a cure for her mother? Or is it to escape the numbness of seeing a parent fade? Neither option is wrong, but there is no winning.
The film takes the most difficult route to expose its bleeding heart. A single actress mutates into three infected worlds, and turns Leah into a tender three-dimensional funeral of guilt, grief, and love. It brings to mind a criminally underrated turn of Hathaway’s from Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, an absurdly evocative sci-fi indie about a wasted adult confronting her childhood demons. Hathway’s face is a miraculous montage of motion-picture emotion. She is everything and everyone in Leah, another knockout anthology performance after painting a portrait of bipolarity in Modern Love. Her eyes hold the key: Leah, after all, is merely an anagram of Heal.
Solos is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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