The Pink Cloud Review: A Weirdly Premonitory Sci-Fi About Being Stuck In Quarantine

Like most recent events, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival has gone from an in-person showcase to a virtual showcase. Despite the change, we’ll always bring you reviews on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie movies to VR experiences.

The pink cloud begins with a post that underlines the appalling ridicule of where we are: it’s a film about people stuck in endless quarantine due to a deadly threat outside their doors. It’s also an early premonitory, as it was written in 2017 and filmed in 2019. It has no useful connection to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is impossible not to draw parallels between The pink cloud and our current reality.

The film takes place in a Brazilian city where a mysterious pink gaseous cloud hovers over residents and kills people if they are outside for more than 10 seconds, trapping them in the building they have taken refuge in for years. That said, The pink cloud is less about the mortal nature of their situation than about the devastating monotony that follows. Forties is seen through a relationship between Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), a one-night stand that turns into something much longer when they are forced to move in together. Over the years that followed, Giovana and Yago managed to become a couple, have a child, go their separate ways without leaving the apartment, virtually go out and get back together.

It’s the quiet moments that are The pink cloudis the most powerful. FaceTime calls get tedious, eating the same thing day in and day out becomes a drag, and the one other person in people’s lives starts to freak out. We’re not meant to suddenly stop physical contact with the rest of the world, and the cataclysmic effects of being cut off from everyone and anyone are quietly destructive. Life suddenly seems to speed up and slow down at the same time. Giovana goes from being staunchly against children to having one, waiting for the deadly cloud to clear while settling into household routines, for there is no other way to live.

Photo: Sundance Institute

At the center of it is the internal battle between the endless hope that things will get better and the realization that there is no end in sight. People change careers to find something they can do at home, learn new skills, watch too much TV, play too many games, find virtual boyfriends and girlfriends, and go to school. the House. Children are born into a void knowing nothing about the outside world other than what they can see from their windows. Adults who remember life before the cloud dream of returning to the world they once knew while working to improve their new living conditions.

The pink cloud is meant to be a sci-fi story, a dystopian world that quietly asks, “How would you deal with this situation?” Watching the movie in 2021, the answer is obvious: I don’t have to wonder how I would fare, I know exactly how I handled not being able to see my family or certain friends. for almost a year. But even with the “fiction” aspect of The pink cloudThe sci-fi set has been removed, the film still hit the hardest part of Giovana and Yago’s ordeal, one that I still struggle with and I’m sure millions of other people are too. .

When does it all end? How optimistic can anyone be that the pandemic – the pink cloud – will go away and life will return to normal? What returns to normal even mean? At a time when I turned to the cinema to try to escape or find answers to problems over which I have no control, The pink cloud is a reminder of our daily life for the past 300 days or so, and it does not provide an immediate answer.

It turns out that, The pink cloud was exactly the movie I needed. I devoured watching this couple struggle with the same internal battle of hope and acceptance, desires and settling, fond memories of the before-time and preparation for what comes after. The pink cloud, a movie written some 1,100 days before the pandemic, ironically became a way for me to deal with much of what happened in 2020.