Onlookers

I myself got enough out of “Onlookers” that I don’t ultimately feel it belongs in the “For Avant-Garde Documentary Lovers” category exclusively.

This is a concept in search of a movie, and an academic exercise that doesn’t give observers much to work with.

Immersive, beguiling, and productively unsettling, "Onlookers" confronts the power of the wealthy, predominantly White and Western tourist gaze to intrude on and warp its surroundings.

Examines the effects of tourism in a country steeped in culture and tradition through a collage of video clips with almost no dialogue—giving the film an immersive quality that’s not only interactive, but also incisive.

The most wonderful thing about this are the subtitles. They are quite simply the most beautiful and poetic captions I’ve ever seen. Scene after scene plays out like a little haiku, adding an undeniably sardonic and wistful edge to this very playful film.

The result is an intriguing if curiously neutral essay from which you can draw your own conclusions…or none at all.

It’s people-watching, but with a twist: they could just as easily swap places with us, extending the conceit and turning our mundane lives into spectacle, too. Reality is endlessly cinematic.

Takes voyeurism to a new level.

Meditative, immersive and poetic.

With everything here pitched as a signifier of the exact same thing, and the signified remaining woefully ignorant to the introduced contexts, Onlookers is a tired echo of polemics long abstracted into the institutionalized nether.