Reviews

Tantalizing semi-doc is not for the literal-minded. The Hollywood Reporter | by John DeFore Half put-on and half document of a fantastically elaborate, gamelike art project, Spencer McCall's The Institute takes viewers on a journey that was shared (to greater and lesser extents) by thousands of San Francisco and Oakland residents from 2008 to 2011. Intentionally hard to decipher, the film will frustrate viewers who insist on knowing which interviewees are recounting real experiences and which are perpetuating fictions hatched by the game's creator, Jeff Hull. But mystery is part of the appeal, and the film's special-engagement rollout, currently expanding beyond California, seems likely to carry it to its most receptive, multiplex-averse audiences. Read more

A divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch. The Dissolve | by Nathan Rabin The Institute generates a lot of suspense and intrigue by remaining so willfully, purposefully obtuse that it’s difficult to tell where the game ends and reality begins, or whether the distinction between the two is relevant to the game’s engineers or the filmmakers chronicling it. That can be frustrating, but it’s also exhilarating, depending on viewers’ tolerance for being strung along and manipulated. Read more

Down the Rabbit Hole with Spencer McCall's The Institute. The Huffington Post | by E. Nina Rothe It is not often that a film leaves me baffled. Alright, at the risk of sounding a bit full of myself, I think I've actually understood all the films I've ever watched, in one way or another. Until The Institute. Read more

It is playful, but profound. It is fact, and it is fiction. It is unbelievable, but it is thought-provoking. The Times-Picayune | By Mike Scott, NOLA.com Director Spencer McCall's film -- one of the growing number of documentaries occupying that "elsewhere" space separating fact and fiction (think "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and "Catfish") -- is a brilliantly constructed film, given that those seeming paradoxes perfectly apply to the subject matter McCall so effectively explores. Read more

Spencer McCall’s bewildering The Institute: Life is elsewhere The Portland Phoenix | By Nicholas Schroeder, portland.thephoenix.com Ostensibly, the first feature film by Spencer McCall seeks to provide a portrait of a San Francisco organization called the Jejune Institute, whose mission hovers somewhere between the poles of self-help, performance art, disinformation, and an alternate-reality game. But if this is a portrait, we're not in art class anymore. Over a series of interviews with organizers and "inductees" spliced with raw-seeming candid footage of Jejune activities in full swing, we join together the bare bones of a most mysterious organizational body. Read more

WiFilmFest 2013 Preview: The Institute Dane101 | by Sean Weitner, dane101.com Remember on LOST whenever they would find a new Dharma film and thread it into the projector? For some, they were the show’s low point, when a perfectly pleasant soap put on airs. For the rest, they were the high point, weird windows into their not-quite-non sequitur fake history. Read more

Indie Pick of the Week: The Institute (Review) Something Obvious | somethingobvious.net Over this past weekend we attended the Atlanta Film Festival. One of the films we saw was a documentary titled “The Institute”. The documentary was filmed by Spencer McCall and tells the story of an alternate reality game revolved around the Jejune Institute in San Francisco. Strange flyers that promoted the institutes scientific breakthroughs were hung throughout San Francisco and invited anyone who was interested to visit the institute’s local headquarters. These inquiring minds were led to a room where they watched a strange introductory video featuring Jejune founder Octavio Coleman, Esq. Were these people being inducted into a cult? At first it seemed as if this was the case, but as we would soon find out it was not.Read more

San Francisco's Baffling Jejune Institute Gets A Documentary The Awl | By Rick Paulas, theawl.com The toughest part of writing about San Francisco's Jejune Institute "thing" was trying to describe it, something I attempted to do for this site twice. In a first piece about the citywide game, which was put on by a group called Nonchalance, I went with "[p]art public-art installation, part scavenger hunt, part multimedia experiment, part narrative story." For the follow-up, I added "underground alternate reality game" to the mix. Both summaries missed the mark, partly because of my own inadequacies as a writer, but also a symptom of the project's sprawling originality—it wasn't like anything else out there, and that was part of what made it so fantastic. Thankfully, Spencer McCall went ahead and made The Institute, a 90-minute documentary about the project that neatly encapsulates what made this whole whatever-it-was so wonderful. Read more

Inventive, Complex World of ‘The Institute’ HollywoodChicago.com | By BrianTT, hollywoodchicago.com “To those dark horses with the spirit to look up and see, a recondite family awaits.” While the Sundance Film Festival goes on all through Park City, a select group of truly independent films is unspooling up on Main Street under the banner of Slamdance. One of the more interesting Slamdance selections this year was the great “The Institute,” a quasi-documentary about an “Alternate Reality Game” that took place in San Francisco from 2008 to 2011. Read more

Slamdance Film Review: The Institute Slug Magazine | By John Ford, slugmag.com Following the storyline of a massive reality game created by Jeff Hull, The Institute searches for the boundary that separates what is real and what is fiction. The game is played throughout the streets of San Francisco—both above and below—described as an "urban playground movement" and as the "ultimate reality game" that wonderfully combines street art and performance theater. As more "inductees" get involved in the search for "Elsewhere," which is more a way of being than a physical place, the game begins to spiral out of the hands of "The Creator," and it becomes clear that this is not a game to some. But the reason for the game's existence might be more intriguing—and more mysterious—than the game itself. Using a combination of interviews and film footage from the creators of the game and from participants, McCall puts together a well-spun story that takes viewers all the way down the rabbit hole. Read more

Slamdance 2013: The Institute KUER | By Doug Fabrizio, radiowest.kuer.org A missing girl, a cult-like organization and its guru, a well-meaning public agency no one has ever heard of, and the actual brick-and-mortar cities of the San Francisco Bay Area. These are the ingredients in a reality-bending game profiled in Spencer McCall’s documentary film The Institute, which showed at this year's Slamdance Film Festival. More than 10,000 people played the Games of Nonchalance, but who was behind them and what was the point? Thursday, we’ll journey through the looking glass with McCall to explore a world teeming just beneath the surface of everyday life. Read more

The Institute Film Threat | By Mark Bell, filmthreat.com Spencer McCall’s documentary The Institute takes a look at a fantastical alternate reality game that played out around San Francisco from 2008 to 2011. Created by Jeff Hull, the ARG revolved around the Jejune Institute and its fictional chairman, Octavio Coleman, Esq, as it led those who followed the instructions hidden around the city on a journey that recontextualized day-to-day reality into something far more interesting. Read more