In The Mist: An oneiric VR excursion inside a gay sauna

In Neo Sora’s HappyEnd (2024), the film opens with an introductory text that begins with the line: “the forces trying to fit people in old frameworks are annoying.” Today, I watched—or in the medium’s parlance: experienced—my first ever virtual reality (VR) film in a special screening at the Very Mainstream Studio. I thought about that line from Sora’s film and mentally replaced the word ‘people’ with ‘stories’ or ‘storytelling’, which I felt could fittingly describe why some filmmakers are driven to explore the potentials of/venture into VR filmmaking. Comparing this to something film-related at the onset seems a bit improper, but it would be disingenuous to churn out the words to perfectly capture such a singularly novice experience, as someone unable to fully grasp yet VR’s grammar or language, and someone whose only experience with VR is related to games or recreation.

The film is called In The Mist by Taiwanese director Chou Tung-Yen, a 14-minute oneiric excursion into a gay sauna that starts like an exercise in voyeurism and ends up as a self-reflexive exploration of queer desire and longing. There’s hardly a plot—perhaps this narrative weight is one of the traditional filmic preoccupations unburdened from the filmmaker by the technology. And yet its observational stance gives it a kind of documentary rigor. As spectator, your role shifts from being a witness to the one being watched. You realize, as your virtual body floats in that penultimate section, that it’s not so much about about the undulating naked bodies but your own presence in that space between the hyperreal and surreal, consciousness now fully heightened. Comparisons to slow cinema aesthetics is unavoidable. Chou even mentions Tsai Ming-Liang (particularly his film The River), whose films luxuriate in the languor of observation.

In this side of Asia, VR films and filmmaking is not something new. Like Cannes and Venice, where Chou’s VR films have participated, Taiwan has also integrated VR films in their film festival programming, something that I think is still a far reality in the Philippines, more so in the regions outside Manila, because its technology require challenging logistics that also has to consider cost. It would be interesting to know the industry outlook and current best practices particularly in making VR films more accessible to the public, something that Chou also mentions as his goal. Chou, also a playwright, talked extensively about his process after the screening, associating VR as akin to the experience of theater that to the language of cinema. His work Traversing the Mist (2024), which competed in Cannes, follows through this thought process, incorporating elements of interactivity and theater to create a more immersive experience. There were also interesting threads of discussion during the open forum that touched on the aspects of archiving and preserving VR work, casting process, and modes of distribution.

It’s probably hard to let go tying VR’s visuality to cinema as someone who writes about films but this disavowal could be a liberating start in exploring an exciting medium of storytelling. I will reflect and definitely write more about this soon.

The ArtsEquator Fellowship Critics Network is made possible with the support of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia.