What’s strange about this high-tech, high-art visual experiment, though, is its Luddite soundtrack. “Reflektor” is a song about getting off the Internet. “We’re so connected, but are we even friends?” Win Butler sings, puncturing the notion that social media sites like Facebook bring us together. Though Mark Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley friends preach the power of machines to promote kinship and closeness, it’s not a notion of intimacy the band is buying. Butler’s lyric “We fell in love at 19, and I was staring at a screen” sounds like a lament, expressing skepticism at the notion that two people in separate rooms, typing or Skyping, can be a worthwhile kind of love.

The anti-tech bent of the lyrics are furthered by Morisset's filmic interpretation. For the clip’s protagonist, a female Haitian dancer played by Axelle Munezero, the Internet exerts a kind of control: She dances like a marionette while we tweak the way her body refracts light. When dozens of points of light pour from bright holes in her face—like a thousand little screens all wired to a single point of origin, and to one another—her face wears the screen gazer’s blank expression. There’s a simple magic here, and the permutations of the bright overlay we direct is a little like the old experience of watching shapes flare and disappear inside a bonfire.

But these points of connection—between the light points and her features, between her movements and ours—become sinister. A brigade of darkly clad men, their black suits reflecting constellations of a million little screens, swarm and surround her, beaming her with the same energy we played with moments before. All that connectedness becomes a tool for control, coercion, subjugation. And then comes the film’s least subtle critique. A shiny tablet is held out to Munezero, and she smashes it. On my tethered iPad, the words “BREAK FREE” appeared, and the touchscreen went all spiderwebbed with cracks. And after that, the tethered phone does nothing anymore—only hangs there on its string, a dead appendage, connection broken.

BREAK FREE. It’s an apt slogan for the Arcade Fire, whose successive records celebrate different aspects of the power of refusal. Funeral enacts a walking away from the crimes and failings of one’s parents; Neon Bible fused the slick tinctures of megachurch teachings with the militant declamations of the hawkish Right, and skewered both; The Suburbs rejected consumerism, scouring the strip-mall horizon for a peaceful place beyond the sprawl. Reflektor, then, may well turn out to be a record that derives energy from its attempt to break the digital manacle—a call to turn off, tune out, and drop off the Google Map.

The protagonist of the interactive “Reflektor” video does just this in the film’s finale, forsaking a dark and solitary room—a mise-en-scene that suggests the spiritual character of Internet use—for a gathered crowd of flesh-and-blood musicians. The light dances naturally off her spangled dress without us manipulated anything. The phone loses its power to project during this last movement of the video, its connection broken. As dancers groove in rhythm and blow through handmade instruments we remember that music unites, too, and without cameras or Ethernet cables. We see that she’s happy for the first time, when before she was only dancing solo in the dark.