Zoom

Essentially a puzzle box film that’s too in love with its own conceit to bother with things like character, Zoom is all structure and no payoff. Three stories, three disparate visuals, and a thread connecting all three of them, which I will be openly discussing so turn away if you don’t want to be spoiled. You’ve been warned.

One story finds a frustrated cartoonist (Alison Pill) who works at a sex doll factory creates a movie director (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is directing the story of a model-cum-writer (Mariana Ximenes). Turns out that the novel Ximenes was writing was the life of Pill’s character, so each story involves someone creating the world of the other one. Each of them a frustrated creative looking for something to satisfy their artistic and sexual lives. That’s the entirety of Zoom in a nutshell, a bit of juvenile sexual psychosis and stylish too-clever-by-half structure that goes nowhere.

Once you’ve broken up the circular structure, and I did it damn fast as narrative coincidences piled up too quickly to not be a contrivance, Zoom doesn’t have much more to offer. There’s the sight of plenty of wonderful actors wasting their gifts on something that probably sounded swell on paper, but it doesn’t pan out to anything worthy of their time/gifts. Who knew the sight of Bernal breaking an electric strap-on penis by going in the ocean to be so banal?