When our Natalia Keogan reviewed The Pink Cloud out of last year’s Sundance, it was the first time the festival had gone virtual. Due to the pandemic, the film fest was 100% online (something that 2022’s edition will be repeating this week), but it also made some of its films hit closer to home. The Pink Cloud, for example, was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, but tells the story of a world where people are forced to stay inside their homes because of a world-spanning rose-tinted gas. Naturally, things play out with some familiarity—if not beat-for-beat accuracy.
In our exclusive clip from filmmaker Iuli Gerbase’s too-close-to-home sci-fi, we see Giovana (Renata de Lélis) living in a family that was once a one-night stand. What was once a fling became parenthood in this neverending quarantine. So she turns to escape where she can, notably VR.
Take a look:
Not only do you get a good sense of the movie’s “impressive (and downright uncanny)” take on pandemic living, but how Giovana must—like some of us—”retreat from her role as a wife, mother and caretaker, instead opting for the manufactured freedom of the virtual realm, where responsibilities and social pressures are non-existent.”
The Pink Cloud opened at the Quad in New York City on January 14, hits L.A.’s Laemmle Monica Film Center on January 21, and will expand on VOD on March 1.