Chattanooga 2024 Review: VIDEO VISION Looks Backward to Look Forward in a Wonderful Queer Romance Body Horror Story
Video Vision wears its Videodrome influence on its sleeve.
Of course there's the name, but it goes further than that; both are about their central characters becoming one with analog technology and both make fantastic use of practical effects, especially in the context of physical media. Yet Video Vision is far from a straightforward pastiche, and is often more of a romance than a horror movie. And by the end, it's combined the two to make some compelling arguments about the ways humans need to relate to time.
Both the horror and the romance begin when Kibby (Andrea Figliomeni) is at work, at the tape and tape player repair shop she attends to with the middle-aged owner Rodney (Shelley Valfer). It's a place she refers to as a graveyard and he calls an orphanage.
One day, a mysterious VCR appears at the store's door without a note. Soon after attempting to sort out what's wrong with it, getting electrocuted and slimed by some strange substance in the process, Kibby begins to see the world in, well, video vision.
Everything she sees looks like it's been shot through a camcorder the day after this first contact. But it doesn't last forever, allowing the film to play with the ebbs and flows of an unwanted transformation.
The same day the inciting VCR arrives, trans man Gator (Chrystal Peterson) comes into the store to have some tapes digitized, and he and Kibby immediately connect, flirting aggressively. They soon start up a relationship, but Kibby, who is straight, worries that a relationship with a trans man without any gender affirming surgeries is too complicated for her. She's downright transphobic a few times, but Gator is patient and kind, understanding that these comments come from a place of fear, not only of a new kind of relationship, but of intimacy in general.
As the parallel plots develop, the film explicitly draws connections between Gator's experience as a trans person and its analog-based body horror. He talks about the "data" and the "shell" of his identity and his body in comparison to the footage that Kibby transforms from analog to digital.
At one point, he goes so far as to say "I've accepted that I'm male, maybe you should accept the fact that you're turning into an obsolete entertainment device, all I know is that you're making my dysmorphia feel normal." It's writing that may be a bit on the nose, but is valuable as an explicit look at why some trans people see themselves in body horror.
Also on the nose, or at the very least feeling more like academic citations than natural dialogue, are the multiple times that characters discuss Nietzche's conception of time as a "flat circle." The explanation given, that all time exists concurrently, isn't something scholars usually attribute to Nietzsche, but he has the coolest quote, so it's fine. These conversations don't only play into the horror of Kibby's transformation, as overwhelmingly left-behind technology attempts to take over her body and move into the future, but also into the film's view of humanity.
Video Vision seems to argue that we can only move forward by looking backward. I don't know that that means we need to accept transformation has always been a part of culture in the form of body horror, so everyone needs to calm down about trans people.
The film's narrative, however, ultimately paints the past as something dangerous if it's not properly attended to; something that can attack our futures, personal and cultural, if we do not afford it proper respect. That the film is able to make this case in the form of a genuinely affecting, often incredibly charming romance and beautifully realized Videodrome-inspired body horror film, makes it one of the most exciting movies I've seen in a long time.
