NOCLIP opens with a silly animated commercial for the Kansas City Missouri mall Crown Center.
It's a real mall that's existed for more than half a century now, though I haven't been able to determine whether or not the commercial is a genuine vintage ad or something made for the film. That sort of stakesless uncertainty characterizes the film as a whole.
The film follows friends Gavin Charles and Alex Conn, who also happen to be the writers/directors/producers and co-editors with their friend Tyrel Ventura, as they aimlessly wander around the mall searching for "backrooms" and "liminal spaces." It's a search that they won't let you forget, as they regularly comment "this is so liminal."
Thankfully, one of them explains liminal spaces to the audience for any of us who may not be familiar with the word that's become a fascination for many online. Liminal spaces are purely transitional, there's nothing happening in a liminal space besides moving through it, as one of the leads says "the only purpose of this room is to connect these other rooms." In a mall, these spaces abound in the form of stairwells, parking garages, and the decoration-less hallways that connect the administrative offices that aren't public facing.
While NOCLIP is described as a "comedic found footage horror film" in the blurb provided by the Chattanooga Film Festival, it's not really funny or scary, and doesn't fall into "found" footage so much as it's shot on an iPhone by the two leads who trade off filming. Yet somehow, it's an oddly compelling watch (to be fair, the 63-minute runtime helps ensure that it doesn't wear out its welcome).
There's something to be said for the exploration of a mall as an endless labyrinth, and Conn and Charles's friendly talk may not be laugh out loud funny, but it's charming in a way that makes spending time with them pleasant. Early on, a connection is drawn between the inescapability of logos in a space like a mall or Times Square and the often purposefully maze-like layouts of malls that's the closest the film comes to attacking capitalism as something that binds our ways of living, but NOCLIP is mostly content to simply wander.
Albeit, as the film goes on, Conn and Charles sometimes become stuck in spaces, digital static sometimes interrupts the images and forces cuts, and an extended sequence turns a seemingly never ending stairwell into an undulating deep fried meme. Again, none of these moments are exactly scary, but that walk through the stairwell is hypnotic in a way that's stuck somewhere between ominous and soothing, an aesthetic space that much of the film exists in. While there's not exactly a score, there's significant use of white noise throughout NOCLIP that alternates between the kind of sounds that would help you fall asleep and sounds that would be at home on a spooky dark ambient album.
It's almost as if the filmmakers sought to create a film that mimics the liminal spaces of the mall, a film that exists only between genres and media. It's not scary, it's not funny, there's no narrative, it's not a documentary, it's not really anything, and yet, just like the spaces the film seeks to explore; there's something fascinating about it.