‘Light Pillar’ Berlinale Review: Melancholy in the Age of Simulation

As elegant as it is refined, as quietly mournful as it is steeped in a distinctly futuristic melancholy, Light Pillar envisions a near-future in which China’s largest film studio is on the brink of shutting down for good. With production grinding to a halt, one of its caretakers passes the time by immersing himself in virtual reality games. Xu Za’s most inspired formal gambit lies in a clever reversal: the “real world” is rendered in animation, while the VR universe is populated by live-action performers. That tactile exchange between mediums becomes one of many delicate gestures in a film that reflects on the uncertain fate of what used to be known as cinema.

Old New East West is a sprawling production complex where anything from contemporary dramas to sweeping historical epics can be shot, thanks to its painstaking replicas of architectural styles from across Chinese history. But in the not-so-distant future imagined here, the facility is falling apart—sets lie in disrepair, infrastructure barely functions, and the dwindling staff are paid sporadically, if at all. Lao Zhao is one of the building’s supervisors, a withdrawn and solitary man who endures these conditions largely because he has nowhere else to go. He lives alone with his cat and spends his idle hours with a VR headset handed to him by the studio’s owner as a form of makeshift compensation.

What begins as a casual distraction—a way to stave off boredom, loneliness, and the creeping anxiety of obsolescence—soon turns into an all-consuming fixation. Inside the simulation, he encounters a beautiful young woman (or rather, her avatar), forming a bond that quickly blossoms into something resembling love. They make plans, seek each other out, even fantasize about traveling to space together—an ambition that requires money, and thus sets Lao Zhao on a quietly desperate mission.

While the VR sequences are performed by actors—Da Peng plays Lao Zhao’s digital alter ego—the image quality is strangely degraded, evoking the worn texture of 8mm film stock. This aesthetic decision lends the virtual realm an uncanny tactility, as if memory itself were being replayed through damaged celluloid. The film drifts back and forth between both planes of existence, gradually lifting a few veils—none of them particularly reassuring—about what’s really happening in the crumbling studio and in the seductive world beyond it.

Working with modest resources by anime standards, Xu Za compensates for any lack of spectacle with visual grace, melancholy restraint, and a genuine tenderness toward a character slipping deeper into emotional and financial peril in a changing country. Though the premise is undeniably bleak—the closure of a once-mighty studio, the fraught attempts to save it, a digital realm riddled with unseen traps—Light Pillar unfolds with surprising lightness, visual poetry, and a tonal register that recalls the cinema of Jia Zhangke more than anything typically associated with contemporary anime.