Rotterdam 2025 Review: VIDEOHEAVEN, Alex Ross Perry's Juggernaut Essay About Video-stores

Alex Ross Perry's new film is a video-essay in the style of Thom Andersen's seminal Los Angeles Plays Itself, in that it focuses on a place and location, and explores this place solely through deep analysis of footage from films that depict the place. Videoheaven, as a video-essay is a step-up from the work of most Youtube-video essayists, if only in ambition and scope. Alex Ross Perry worked on it for ten years, and it shows.

The foremost quality of the film is foremost in its thorough research for the selection of the material, running the gamut from big Hollywood blockbusters to relatively obscure direct-to-video horror films and indies. What these films depict are video stores in a variety of iterations, from the mom-and-pop-stores, to the big city stories like Tower Video, to chains like Blockbuster. In a few chapters, Videoheaven makes the case that the depiction of video stores in films was a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, they helped build the image and reputation of the store, on the other hand, they increasingly leaned into the uncomfortable realities of a video store visit, possibly helping its demise. It's all very thoroughly portrayed, maybe a bit too thoroughly, as this juggernaut of a video-essay runs for a whopping 3 hours. Which might be okay for youtube, where this is consumed in snippets or as background noise; but is a bit too daunting a task for the festival circuit.

Still there are a lot of commendable features to this film: Maya Hawke's narration is soothing and pleasant, winkingly acknowledging her own participation in video store nostalgia in Stranger Things, while never overtly stating it. Most of the editing and narration is similarly associative and subtly done, like when David Spade shows up in three consecutive fragments, without the film overtly stating so. Still, there are some big downsides to Videoheaven. While it is no small feat they pulled off there, especially in it's associative eb-and-flow in editing, sometimes the film lazily flattens the themes of the films it represents to make a point.

To give an example: It is true that The Watermelon Woman was set in a video store. And yes, there is a certain poetic echo to the fact that these video stores now take a lost place in culture in a similar way that the central thesis of the film is about lost media. But reducing The Watermelon Woman to just that, and barely mentioning its navigations of racial constructs... It is obtuse at best, borderline offensive at worst.

That is the worst offender, but sometimes recontextualizing the films presented to "video store movies" means that they flatten the movie to just its setting. It is the opposite of the intended effect: they want to show more layers to our cultural construct of a setting, but instead they strip away layers from the movies depicted. Videoheaven feels reductive in its worst parts, and with this running for three hours, there is a lot of time for those bad spots to show up.

Especially the chapter about video store clerks runs for way too long, taking up almost an hour of the run time. As this part of the essay is sort of a parade of cringe, delving into the social awkwardness of video store clerks, the potential danger of them shaming you for going to "the back room" and more such social anxieties; it might be a bit too much to ask of the audience. Especially once you ask them to sit through yet another iteration of a video clerk shaming someone's film choice. While the deep research and the wide variety of fragments is commendable, it feels like some darlings needed to be killed here. In the later parts Videoheaven gets increasingly repetitive.

Still, even if the film doesn't fully do some of its selections justice and instead overly focuses on getting as many titles in as possible, Videoheaven is worth the watch. The selections are really interesting, and brought many new titles to my attention. And at times, when focusing at more length for certain titles there are stretches of great analysis. This project might have worked better in shorter, tighter-edited installments, as a sort of video-essay series. But for sheer ambition and scope I applaud Alex Ross Perry and his team.