“Real offers us room for contemplation, much like a museum installation does. Tulli seeks to spark ideas, rather than offer answers – to questions we don’t have the inclination or time to confront.”

Italian director Adele Tulli’s second feature-length film Real uses its documentary format to present a broad survey of the current digital landscape, how technology has infiltrated every aspect of the human experience, and whether we might be on the brink of speciation – fundamentally mutating and re-wiring ourselves. Real is presented as a film essay, cutting together footage of varied provenance, but admirably without a voiceover so that the viewers can come to their own conclusions. It isn’t dissimilar to the, now frequently feature-length, video essays you see on Youtube and other platforms made by content creators, though Real’s elevated production quality and globetrotting ‘storylines’ make it a cut above.

Real begins with an imposing shot of the Covilhã Data Center in Portugal, an impressive brutalist building surrounded by a moat of water – a grounding image in the sense the intangible, ephemeral internet is also run off physical computers and hard drives. From there we launch into several of the storylines we track across Real. These storylines are loose vignettes related to a specific character or theme. There’s a ‘smart home’ powered by Samsung’s Bixby assistant in which an Asian family lives. The kid asks questions, like who is Bixby’s mother, and as befits AI Bixby provides cryptic and evasive answers. There is an adult OnlyFans performer who does a live explicit stream from her living room (real-life performer Migi Stardust); a delivery driver in Seoul who live-streams his quotidian delivery errands and bike rides through the city on Twitch; a Busan Eco Delta Smart City project where a hundred families have the privilege of living rent-free for 5 years in a super high-tech mini-city completely served by AI-powered robots for the minor trade-off of surrendering all their data and privacy to the tech firm running the project.

Other fascinating tangents emerge. A significant chunk of Real is devoted to simulated reality spaces where people don VR sets and avatars as they navigate make-believe places, for many people a way to find their true selves and even romantic partners. A young man in Berlin checks into rehab for overreliance on screens totaling over 16 hours a day or roughly every waking moment – a circumstance none of us are really far from. Another nod to connectivity is offered in the form of Hexatronic Cable Factory which creates and lays the ethernet wires that connect continents on the ocean floor thousands of meters below. There are Zoom yoga classes and TikTok dances, channel-ending YouTube confessions, and ASMR videos. Real really is a compendium of all manner of digital content and experiences available today.

Real also functions as an illustration of digital filming technology available today. There is footage from drones, underwater photography, AI directional cameras, facial recognition installations and, most strikingly, spherical 360-degree cameras that distort the image to create trippy hallucinogenic visuals – in addition to the regular webcam, phone front-camera options, and Instagram filters that are available for filming today.

To what end you might wonder, and Tulli scrupulously doesn’t push any theory or thesis. Indeed, little in Real is novel, as we all engage with technology so intimately on a day-to-day basis that the occasion for reflection isn’t really available or even necessary; technology is a fait accompli – the ship has sailed and AI will only hasten our descent into the digital realm. Even the one explicit point that Real does make, that we are on our way to evolving into altered technology-dependent creatures, isn’t really insightful or surprising but rather an accepted sociological reality. Even so, at a breezy, undemanding 84 minutes, Real offers us room for contemplation, much like a museum installation does. Tulli seeks to spark ideas, rather than offer answers – to questions we don’t have the inclination or time to confront