Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: short film

  • Laboratory Conditions (2017) – short film

    Some believe in ghosts, a few see spirits, and many deny souls. How odd that this digital age is when it is, in fact, a kind of spectral age in which Alexa with no face exists without being seen!

    Laboratory Conditions is an engaging cinematic short story about a doctor who puts heart before reason. She also has a brilliant mind, but it’s not corrupted but cherished in her faith in the human spirit. It is an odd combination of sentiment and reason seen in someone like her, or so she may seem. Or is she so? Humans are dualistic and ambivalent anyway, so I can’t say she’s all good, but at least she is sensible and sympathetic.

    Her opposite is the head of medical searchers of the hospital by which she is employed, and she is the only Reason with a face despaired of humanity. She measures human worth by status and thinks those found on the low rungs of the social ladders are unworthy of decent treatment. A modern-day eugenist is on a par with a god deciding who will live or not. She is amoral and negates the existence of human souls, or is she deluded to believe so? Anyway, she doesn’t care about it, an iota. Or has she sold her soul to the devil?

    The film is about 17 minutes long and can be watched on YouTube. It also stars a surprisingly famous cast, such as Marissa Tomei and Minnie Driver, who are excellently cast to play the fitting roles. I have read the comments, an electric mix of kudos to the doctor’s humanity and criticism of her cruelty. But they are all missing the real evil wrapped in a human’s guise among the faces.

  • About Backrooms

    It’s gone viral. Sensational it’s been. The latest scare, the newest horror, comes in Backrooms, a YouTube phenomenon that has swept the world’s compass in muffled terror. I have seen it through an algorithm, and I think I have entered the door into the backrooms – willingly by the winks of intrigued moments. Is this the way people get lost in the maze of horror? Even if they are fictional, or so they like to think, nothing is purely fictional without some foundation in reality. Be it ever imaginary, a mental void, emotional distress, continual depression, or perpetual heartaches will be of their backrooms with seemingly no way out. And I think this feeling of utter hopelessness is where Christianity fills or saves the wretchedness of a soul with a promise of hope, the existence of a reason to go on in a seemingly purposeless life.

    Watching a few of the Backrooms series makes me realize that this is how the present-day MZ generation sees a concept of a labyrinth where King Minos of Crete at Knossos kept his illegitimate half-man, half-bull son Minotaur and feeds him on Athenian youths until the Athenian hero Theseus with the help of Adrianne’s thread ball came to the rescue and killed the monster. Is it considered too cheesy for today’s youths to think of Adrianne’s thread ball? Backrooms are all devoid of Christian hope and Greek wit because new generation kids are too smart to believe the existence of such saving grace because there is none of such nonsense, and because they are simply the best of all generations wallowing in the advanced civilization only countable steps below the most advanced extraterrestrial beings in the universe.

    Notwithstanding the ingenious idea of creating such terrifying liminal places within a minimal budget, the whole series will shine in its brilliance as a genre of online game series rather than a film in the fashion of a fake documentary as a new Blaire Witch Project. As civilization gets more technologically advanced, the people become more highly primitive, returning to the laws of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth with no signs of light-heartedness as if it were synonymous with simple-mindedness or backwardness. And I don’t know why Verdi’s “The Chorus of Hebrews” keeps playing in my mind these days.