A man lives an isolated life in a concrete room. Each workday he walks through abandoned infrastructure to his job where he is fed some milky substance through a tube. This is his life, until he crosses paths with a coworker of the opposite sex.
A man lives an isolated life in a concrete room. Each workday he walks through abandoned infrastructure to his job where he is fed some milky substance through a tube. This is his life, until he crosses paths with a coworker of the opposite sex.
Compellingly claustrophobic imagery, and the drudgery of seeing and repeating the same tasks endlessly is convincingly portrayed. That the man’s work has no visible meaning, and his “worker bee” mentality doesn’t question or fight the status quo speaks to many of the menial tasks Man must do to simply survive. Yet one day, a startling new element presents itself; a woman. Dressed identically and equally silent, she appears as much a drone as the man to the system and her lot in life, but they begin to (literally) cross paths. Slowly, a sense of comfortable companionship grows. While the physical world remains unchanged, small changes are happening in the man and woman. The couple walk ruined landscapes, their hands drawn to one another, yet not joining, and then a touching scene of vulnerability has them experience touch and comfort for the first time. Their attraction presents Possibility, but when the man’s television prompter suddenly mocks the couple’s urge to kiss by throwing up video of a couple vulgarly jousting their tongues at one another, they halt their movement to join as one.
The bathtub scene is strange – a foreign object in the sterile environment previously seen and experienced – so it breaks the 4th wall when the woman climbs in the water-filled vessel fully clothed. A small smile of invitation curls her mouth , and it initially seems like a playful game as the man begins to move back and forth from one end of the bath to the other. The ensuing act of violence shocks: it is the feral response of an animal unable to cope with the stimulation innocently offered.
Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch’s works inform the palette, pace, symbolism, and fatal vision of this film. Did I like it? Not especially. But I’ll watch it again to revisit the light and shadow, see the silent and repressed man briefly flicker to Life with a sense of Hope, then stare at the sky alone after killing the thing he loved.