EXTASE is a film that melds documentary with essay. A look at the anorexia of its subject, it is more about creating a head space so that we don’t come to understand the subject intellectually but rather emotionally. This is a film that will make you see not an intellectual truth but the much more powerful emotional one.
I was kind of blindsided by EXTASE. I went into the film expecting to kind of breeze through it. It was after all about anorexia and I’ve seen and read things on the subject. However I wasn’t very far into the film before I realized I wasn’t in Oz any more. Somehow I had disconnected from my surroundings and I was traveling in the body of someone else. I drifted along in this other head space before being dropped back into my life when it was done.
Who needs a VR head set?
EXTASE blew me away. It upended expectations and messed up my head. Staring at my screen I found that because the trip I took watching the film was purely emotional and somewhere beyond words, I really don’t have words to explain what I think because I don’t think about the film but I feel it.
Playing at the Museum of Modern Arts Doc Fortnight EXTASE is a heady trip you need to take when in screens March 28 to April 2,
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