‘Zoom In, Zoom Out’ Venice Review: Searching for a Lost Soul in Digital China
After his roommate disappears, Shi and his girlfriend’s partner search the physical and digital worlds, uncovering unexpected truths about his life. Screening in the Critics Week.
Anyone who spends time in China will quickly notice that young people’s relationship with their smartphones is on a level that far exceeds anything you’re likely to see in the West. People everywhere are glued to their phones these days, of course, but in China that attachment often borders on total dependence. In public, it’s common to see people chatting, but also ordering food, gaming, gambling, and even—as I’ve witnessed firsthand—buying and selling stocks as casually as if they were playing a mobile game to kill time. That world is portrayed in Dong Jie’s debut feature, which moves back and forth between reality and the virtual realm to construct what amounts to a psychological detective story about the disappearance of a young man.
The protagonist is Shi (Sun Yang), a lonely young programmer who develops games for a company owned by a friend. His life revolves almost entirely around his work until he realizes that Gao, the roommate he shares an apartment with, has vanished. He has no way of reaching him, and so he begins trying to figure out what happened. But his investigation unfolds far more in the digital world than in the real one. Gao maintained a strong online presence, so Shi immerses himself in his social media accounts, impersonates him in online worlds, and initially tries to uncover his whereabouts through his virtual life.
The person who joins him in the search is YY (Zhao Tian’ai), Gao’s girlfriend, who helps him navigate the virtual environments the film depicts through deliberately rudimentary animation. As Shi neglects his job and the rest of his life, he gradually grows closer to YY while new clues begin to emerge about what may have happened to his roommate. Is he alive or dead? Did he suffer an accident, take his own life, or is there something even stranger behind his disappearance?
The mystery serves as a gateway into the worlds inhabited by young people like Shi, YY and Gao. Although Shi’s detective work briefly pulls him back into the physical world —at one point he tries to track down the delivery driver who brought Gao the last package he ever received— the investigation increasingly migrates online, where he searches not only for connections and possible suspects but also for a better understanding of the life Gao lived through his avatar. Little by little, Zoom In, Zoom Out stops being a missing-person investigation and becomes something closer to a journey into the way many young Chinese experience reality, in ways that can feel unfamiliar to outsiders.
While the film never explicitly addresses artificial intelligence, Dong creates a striking visual world that constantly shifts between different formats while asking how many of our relationships today exist not with flesh-and-blood people but with icons and avatars, and how much of who we are in the real world carries over into the virtual one. Perhaps, this thoughtful and evocative film suggests, life and death are fundamentally analog concepts that may soon cease to mean what they once did. Perhaps there is a place —still somewhere between mysterious and dystopian— where people never truly disappear at all, but continue to exist forever and ever.
