Much of waking life is filled with the question of how to fill time. What should we do today? Where should we eat? Hanging out with friends or loved ones offers some way to pass the time and live in our own little utopias for a bit. Filmmaker Eduardo Williams takes this universal experience and gives it an expansive, surreal shape in The Human Surge 3.
A follow-up to his 2016 film The Human Surge, this film takes the themes of drifting youth worldwide and doubles down, taking a languid, fluid approach. It’s at once a direct refutation of traditional cinematic sensibilities and a dreamy space where we can see radical possibilities for the medium and the world.
The Human Surge 3 takes its time meandering through the ever-expanding, seemingly borderless world it takes place in. Mostly, we follow characters as they walk through lush forests, bustling cities, and gorgeous mountaintops.
They speak in stream-of-consciousness conversations. The Human Surge 3 does something interesting and evocative with its use of language in this respect: the characters we watch speak to each other in different, sometimes overlapping languages such as Sinhala, English, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. The effect is both hypnotizing and enticing: a future where language is universal and we’re all closer to each other because of it.
The free-flowing movement of the camera and the 360-degree effect create a world that is engrossing and expansive. As our characters talk about hunting billionaires, have heart-to-hearts, and move through the multitude of landscapes that make up the world of The Human Surge 3, it’s hard to look away. Even when a scene focuses on a still, lush jungle, devoid of characters, you’re pulled in until the leaves and fauna swirl and turn into something else entirely: a whirlwind of color and sound. This radical re-imagining of what world-building can look like on film is enticing – if you’re looking for something straightforward with an intricate plot, you’re in the wrong place.
But if you’re willing to take a chance on something completely new and unique, The Human Surge 3 might be just what you’re looking for. It’s a film that refuses to be tied down by any conventional notions of narrative or structure, drifting, like its characters, across landscapes, content to be its own thing.
The borderless, queer utopia presented here is a welcome escape from our daily miseries in a world with borders and homophobia. Shot in Sri Lanka, Peru, and Taiwan, the film makes these very different locations feel like one. It’s nice to imagine a world where you can move as freely as the wind, going where you want to or need to go without the heavy weight of xenophobia or militarization. Imagining these new worlds is a key part of making them happen. If we can start dreaming of something as bold as a world without borders, then someday it might just exist beyond the veneer of the silver screen.
Throughout its two-hour runtime, The Human Surge 3 takes its time challenging our expectations of what cinema and the world should be. It lets us all think about the radical possibilities inherent in a world that values everyone. In this way, it’s something super rare: a space to dream about the radical possibilities of what cinema and the world can be with no limits.
