Dose

An overly abstract short which has philosophical aspirations above its own visual shape.

“This film may hurt the sentiments of those who love the idea of spreading hate, cancel cultures, and the idea of dictatorship, etc. Maker of the film is not responsible. Say no to drugs and violence.”

This opening quote promises something profound, maybe even life-affirming. Rejecting hate in the abstract and embracing love. Its message is then muddied by the unintentionally hilarious phrase “dictatorship etc.” Etcetera could be added to the end of a shopping list; it’s less at home as the follow-up to totalitarianism. The conflation of drugs and violence is also confusing, as generally the two are not synonymous, yet maybe here its idea of pharmaceutical abuse does bring the two together.

An unseen figure stands in front of a blank red box and carries out various processes to create a vaccine against love. They remove small golden hearts from inside an apple. The signifier of an apple could allude to Genesis and original sin, with its small totems of playful love plucked out one by one. They then produce a powder of hate, cut up into lines for consumption. Perhaps this is a visual metaphor for addiction, although one which contradicts its concept of authoritarian control by stressing individual choice.

The dialogue is didactic and very limited, demanding that its ideas be taken seriously without any clear message. Its attempts to be poetic or lyrical in some way are undermined by the dull and tired language, taking any of the possible magic out of its words.

The first-person perspective puts us in the position of the manufacturer, yet the process of production has no real bearing on the end product. Instead serving as a series of visual metaphors, this perspective provides little in the way of viewer suture, preventing us from really being embedded as a part of the production, and therefore gaining any insight into its concept of dictatorship.