Snorkeling

A seventeen-year-old boy and his friends get caught up with a new drug on the scene, which offers an escape from the crushing hopelessness they feel in the real world through hallucinations and out of body experiences.

Within the last year there has been an explosion of a new drug into the communities of North America – Nitroxin. Troxy – to give it its street name – is administered from a small canister attached to a pipe and a mask, which is then placed over the junkie’s face and breathed in through a process called Snorkeling. Once snorkeled, the user then drifts out of consciousness, usually into an inanimate stupor, while their mind travels freely around traversing their inside thoughts without question or worry. There are plenty of trippy visuals to accompany the high of Troxy, usually with environment bending results, as well as a tendency to imagine beings or other creatures that aren’t really there.

Michael (Zolghadri) and his pal Brice (Johnson) are already pot-heads, enjoying a series of spliffs throughout their day as they navigate high school and the surrounding environment. Jameson (Froseth) is Michael’s crush, and a dope-fiend too, so when she plays the part of Eve in the Garden of Eden and offers Michael a taste of the forbidden fruit, he all too willingly takes it from her and blasts his brains out with a shot of Troxy to expand his consciousness. Soon, the teenagers are getting high on a regular basis and tripping their little minds out together while they try to come to terms with this thing called life.

For seventy-odd minutes we watch the kids languishing in their comfortable middle-class lives, and listen to them wax lyrical about the state of their mental health due to the problems of the world. All of this seems to be done unironically, without any question of these privileged, well-off, self-entitled whiners actually knowing anything of the difficulty and hardship outside of their suburban bubbles. Director, Emil Nava presents these soundbites and portraits to us as a series of talking heads, where the children talk straight to the camera and answer questions from an unknown interviewer, as well as a more conventional narrative where we follow them around in their daily lives. Together these sequences take up around two-thirds of the narrative, with the rest given over to the psychedelic hallucinations experienced by one or more of the main characters.

This breaking up of the narrative also means that the film is broken up into sections or sequences which we follow for a short time before moving onto another. This gives Snorkeling the feeling of it being more of an extended music video than of an actual feature, especially as the narratively driven dialogue is kept to a severe minimum, and the rest of the talking merely provides context. This will come as no surprise to those who know Nava as a music video director, and here he plays to his strengths in providing striking visuals, even though there’s not much story to go along with them. For the entire runtime we’re following the kids in corridors, into parks, out into nature, and around their lavish homes, as they talk about their difficulties with living in this world, telling themselves that they must be depressed, most likely because social media made them believe it is so.

For that, the theme of Snorkeling becomes not so much that the kids are escaping into a drug fuelled haze, but more that they all believe their lives to be so messed up and that they are all so depressed. There is not a strong message on whether the drug-taking is truly bad or not, with everyone enjoying their little sojourns into another world, explaining to the camera how the drug helps them with their thoughts and their fears, right up until the very end where the spectre of overdose finally rears its ugly head.

With Nava’s expertise, the visuals look truly stunning at times in Snorkeling, with the hallucinatory sequences drifting between oversaturated filters, CGI effects and good, old-fashioned animation. Everything is accompanied by an intense and strongly moulded soundtrack which follows the characters on their mind-bending journeys, enhancing the feel of a music video, as what should be narrative structure is played out in the background as the main characters float through the scenes. This sort of visual expression definitely works best in the short form, and when there’s a definite narrative coming from the lyrics, but when used to create a full-feature the storytelling limitations of the device really do come through.

While Snorkeling is a real visual and auditory experience, taking the viewer on a trip that’s over an hour long, that’s really all there is. The story is not generally a story at all, and the characters are only caught together in a thematic device which they experience but don’t necessarily explore. There’s not enough there to justify the feature length runtime, as mainly all we do is follow the kids around with a soundtrack playing behind them as they try to get high. Still, the arthouse feel of the film might be enough for some, and for those who are happy to have an audio-visual feast without needing to work too hard on the narrative side of things, Snorkeling might be just the pill you need to escape from the world for seventy-odd minutes.