It's called illuminati programming

@@bignoseweirdo4317 That would be rather banal

@@bignoseweirdo4317 lmaooo

@@bignoseweirdo4317 This idea is enphasised in the film itself. Lots of people in this film are staring either at the skeleton or black posters, chanting something barely audible. The skeleton is their idol and the black posters are the doorways; just as us viewers are tricked into idolising celebrities as they act out impressive, larger-than-life characters that we all stare at through black screens (TV, phone, computer). "If you stare into an abyss, it also stares into you."

True, what you call _tropes_ are of course nothing more than the repetition of ideas seen in hundreds of horror films made over many dozens of decades --- that cannot be helped. Nothing is born in a vacuum, especially art. This film attempts to be a new flavor of Ice Cream by combining all previous flavors of ice cream and who is to say that by that sheer act they do not end up creating a brand new flavor? It may not be an identifiable one, but that Ice Cream, like this film, though lacking an identity will make up for it with it's rich, overwhelming sweetness. In the end, however, like most horror films, the calories are _empty, man_ but we sure do enjoy the act of consummation (when the ingredients are well combined that is, as they are here).

I recommend you to watch "Human all too human" documentary

I think the Universe is pointless and it isn't scary at all it's fine

This is the most interesting movie i have seen in years

this is a classic lovecraftian horror. it's fascinating

Me too. Can’t find it on blue ray

In the future, “there's no politics” is a pretty good indicator that you're taking to the intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich

Good one. But it made me think about all the memes proliferating the internet now, and how their repetitious nature renders their sources meaningless.

I still don't know why he keeps saying he grew up in SF. What's the special about it?

A bridge.

A canvas

I would love to have attended his lecture. They probably would have hooked me in to their cult.

Both.

@@blackPeopleAreGarbag I mean I love the movie either way regardless of its political intentions, but I am curious if the writer/director David Prior is familiar with the actual doctrines in Buddhism regarding "emptiness" because they have nothing to do with the nihilistic subjective idealism espoused by the cult in the film, but rather such doctrines are more like a form of anti-essentialism paired with nominalism.

@@PseudoMystic I don't think there is any politics in this movie

@@user-yp6yr9te7l When James goes to the Pontifex institute the questionnaire includes stuff like, "Nothing is binary, everything is fluid,” “Science says the genders are discrete,” “A woman is just a likely to have a penis as a man is.” While it's not explicitly clear where the Pontifex institute stands on these these specific questions, they overall appeal to conservative fears about postmodernist boogeymen corrupting the youth. What's nice about the film though is that it gives the cult some degree of truth and merit in favor of subtlety and ambiguity rather than the whole thing being a ham-fisted metaphor, and from what I've heard from the director, while he's expressed worry over what he perceives to be a culture that is fostering a sort of devaluing of objectivity (I'm paraphrasing an interview on youtube), he deliberately wanted the film to be ambiguous and so included elements that would undermine simplistic interpretations. That ambiguity doesn't mean there's no political implications in the film, it just means the film has multiple, potentially conflicting, lines of implication and more interesting goals than trying to get the viewer to settle on one easy judgement regarding those things.

@@PseudoMystic That's not politics though, the questionnaire had a whole lot of other off the wall things completely unrelated to sex and gender, or don't fit under conservativism vs leftism. Like "the brain can itch" or "I have sense of health and wellbeing" or "the entire universe is an erogenous zone". LOL at that last one. Even sex and gender aren't fundamentally always related to political sides. I think I know what you're saying, but I feel the questionnaire was just a tool to let people know this cult is "weird" and not meant to represent any portion of the political spectrum in any capacity. I am a biologist though, I would say gender is indeed discrete and binary in anthropoid primates. That is an apolitical position. Note: in biology when we say 'gender' we mean biological sexual polymorphism. That word has a biological definition because "sex" as a term is already taken lol. "Sex" is usually used to refer to mating. So to not confuse ourselves, we don't say the "sexes" we say "genders." Or, we used to. The two terms can sort of now be interchangeable. Which ends up confusing more people, lmao. Since we rarely deal with sociological things, when we refer to gender in the social sense, we almost always specify "gender identity". I guess you can think of it as a 3-pronged approach: sex=copulation, gender=biological sexes, gender identity=social gender. In fact, I didn't realize there were sociological definitions of the word "gender," to us that's a biological term. Disciplines don't really talk to each other, I think. It wasn't until very recently that I'd even come across social sciences referring to these things differently.