Old-school indie meets cutting-edge AI to make the damnedest paper dolls you have ever seen in auteur Antero Alli’s latest out-there feature Blue Fire. Psychology professor Timolean Paige (Douglas Allen) has disturbing dreams of a car going off a cliff. He awakens to a door knock with the news his parents’ car went off a cliff. His lover and student Dana (Kasia Caravello) comes over to comfort him, as the dream aspect has him very unnerved.
After a time, he is visited by Sam (Bryan Smith), who is inquiring about a room Tim is renting. While blasting death metal on his earbuds, Sam informs Tim that he is very quiet and will be working for long hours by himself. Sam says he is an AI coder doing work for Elon Musk, so he can easily afford the room. He also says Dana is strangely beautiful and asks for a picture he can make art from. Dana is creeped out by Sam and tells Tim she doesn’t trust him. Dana then has a dream where Sam appears as a cloaked demon over an altar. Meanwhile, Sam has a dream about a dancing ghost-faced woman who splits into two, which catches his fancy.
“Dana then has a dream where Sam appears as a cloaked demon over an altar.”
Sam proceeds to start coding on his laptop while smoking pipe loads of high-powered salvia. He is overwhelmed with splendid visions and runs out of his room, wrapped in a blanket like a superhero cape. Dana ends up finding Sam dancing in the middle of oncoming traffic, zapping out of his gourd.
Alli bills Blue Fire as a cyber-fi fever dream, which is a more than apt description of genre expectation. Yes, the biggest narrative moves are technically science fiction, but in an intellectual manner as opposed to traditional jumpsuits and laser kicks. Also, as we find ourselves planted smack dab in the near future, everything presented here is technically possible now. All of this takes a backseat to a lot of deep-dive dialogue into Jungian psychology.
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