Jessica Forever

An excruciatingly meaningless piece of work, Jessica Forever transpires in a futuristic landscape where orphans have been inexplicably outlawed and are hunted by gun-toting drones – with the narrative following Aomi Muyock’s Jessica as she attempts to sustain a safe haven for a group of young men. It’s an oddball yet workable premise that’s employed to consistently nonsensical and flat-out unwatchable effect by filmmakers Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, as the movie’s been suffused with a whole host of meaningless, hilariously pretentious attributes that immediately set the viewer on edge – with the aggressively tedious atmosphere compounded by as sluggish a pace as one could possibly envision. The film, which generally plays like a parody of a European art film, suffers from a total lack of both character development and context, with the latter especially problematic given the narrative’s proliferation of unusual elements – including a sentient, talking water bubble and a character with apparent teleportation abilities. It goes without saying, of course, that Jessica Forever is entirely unable to sustain the viewer’s interest even fleetingly, and while it’s difficult not to wonder just what Poggi and Jonathan Vinel are trying to do here (ie this all must mean something), the end result is an intolerable and infuriating that now ranks among the worst of the worst at TIFF in this new century (or perhaps ever, truly).

no stars out of ****