Oh, how horrible modern life is.

Spoilers.

Abbie is what would colloquially known as a couch-potato. He spends his life playing videogames. When his roommate challenges him complete Pacman before getting up, Abbie takes the challenge seriously and want leave couch until he is done. At the same time, the Y2K bug gets started and the whole world is falling apart with Abbie still continuing on his quest.

Okay, it’s not a good movie. It’s a good premise for a short, but 90 minutes is way too long. Also, I just don’t find the bro-ish conversations at all funny. You know, just two people talking with no common interest or goal, so they just repeat themselves over and over again in a very futile attempt to get somewhere. Cut this into 30 minutes and put it on Vimeo or something and it would be great. Most of Abbie’s encounters would be much better as just short hints at what’s going on. Some of them would probably be a good montage.

With that out of the way, the idea is interesting. Abbie is wasting away his life and the only thing he can take seriously is this stupid challenge his friend throws at him off-handedly (and soon forgets about anyhow). Abbie expects everyone to be on board with this thing, which is just absurd to anyone outside of his little pocket of reality. Yet, he persists. He has to relieve himself in bottles, eat whatever he can reach from his position and sit through a bug bomb in the apartment.

At some point, after the world outside has already ended, we learn that somehow Abbie still has electricity while no-one else does. This is a small leadup to Abbie reaching some sort of enlightenment. Okay, that’s interesting. Extreme dedication to slacking as a spiritual journey. It does pay off, but it just takes way too long to get there.

Of course, this means that the horror of the movie is hard to pinpoint. No Film School has attempted to form a sort of taxonomy of horror and I can’t really find where this would fit, but I guess it’s sort of a movie about madness. It’s nowhere near Psycho (I haven’t seen the other example – Frailty – but it’s on my shelf waiting), but it feels like the horror comes from a similar place from the human brain we don’t really understand or want to understand.