Review: All Operators are Currently Unavailable might break your brain (in the best way possible)

I would say that most of the time, when I sit down to write a review, I have a pretty decent idea of what I'm going to write. When I started this blog, part of my goal was for it to not feel like work, to come at it from a personal place, messy even, and just write from the heart. It doesn't need to be polished, it can just be easy, whatever comes to mind.

But even with that freedom I allow myself, I find myself at something of a loss with where to begin, or what to say at all, about experimental Croatian director Dalibor Barić's latest feature, the Oscar-eligible All Operators are Currently Unavailable. I watch some out-there stuff, both for this blog and just for my own enjoyment, and I often really enjoy it. That's definitely the case here -- this movie is awesome -- but man, it is really out there. Like, one of those movies where I don't think it's possible to capture it in words. One that feels like a puzzle box that is impossible to solve, and maybe isn't even solvable. Maybe to try to solve it is to misunderstand the film at a fundamental level. I think one could argue that this is a movie about the impossibility of understanding the world around us, the futility of it, but it feels like that's too simple, too neat.

Let me try, I guess, to even say what this movie is about.

Roman Novotny is a screenwriter whose best professional days are behind him. He doesn't want to sell-out and write a superhero movie or some shit like that, not that that's even an option for him. But his agent brings him an intriguing new job: to serve as a writer at a hotel resort, where he'll help generate new pages every day that will then be played out by the thousands of actors there, each of whom fancies themselves the main character in the film (if it even is a film). Everyone else is an extra. Roman is, in a way, a generator of main character energy, the very fuel that makes us all tick, and maybe what makes the world go round.

But that decently understandable premise is almost immediately upended and complicated as additional layers of unreality get added over and over again, creating this sort of funhouse maze of conflicting and competing realities. There were times when I started wondering, is this whole thing a film within a film? Then, later, is it a film within a film within a film? Or is it all one film, the film, the one I'm watching right now, all one thing that is meant to be considered holistically?

It's a sort of brain-blasting, meta, sci-fi fever that begs you to lean forward, retune your brain to its bizarre wavelength, and surrender yourself to tumble down the kaleidoscopic rabbit hole where there is no bottom. Sometimes when watching something this singular, I feel like I end up just letting it wash over me, giving up on following it and rather just enjoying the ride. Not so here. Here, I wanted to understand as much as was possible to understand, to uncover what architecture there was to reveal, to solve for x where there is a solution, if there ever is. The film is something of a thriller, and it's also a thrill. There are twists, turns, guns (some which are normal, some which are decidedly not). And, yes, much to think about.

And just as the narrative is this tangled, thorny thing, so, too, is the animation, which draws from various media and feels like it's shaped by intuition. There are times where the characters are 2-D, graphically simple, clean. For much of the film, they're polygonal 3-D models, blocky and bulky with faces that look like they were drawn on with a Sharpie. There are times when the settings are stripped away, revealing stage marking underneath. In at least one moment, Roman becomes one of those art class figures made up of a bunch of ovals. It's one of the most fascinating movies to look at I've ever seen, not beautiful exactly, but entrancing, hypnotic.

Maybe "hypnotic" is the word. Because watching All Operators are Currently Unavailable feels a little bit like being put under a spell. And if you're suggestible to it, it's a truly unique experience.