I don’t really “get” Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama. I’ll be the first to admit that this might simply be a deficiency on my part, but I don’t think that’s the issue. There is no arguing the technical mastery on display: the framing is gorgeous, the camera placements are interesting and well thought out, the photography is impeccable, the color contrast in every scene is nothing short of brilliant, the acting is solid, and the music is deployed masterfully (I never knew I wanted to see a scene of betrayal set to Chief Keef before this movie). With all this perfect literal-filmmaking on display, I can’t help but ask: what is it all saying? I genuinely don’t know, and the lack of understanding or clarity in the message of the film made me ask another question: why is this feeling familiar? Nocturama isn’t the first time I’ve seen a movie or television show that displayed such perfect control over the physical means of film production while falling flat when it came time to make an actual point, or even just to tell a story; Nocturama is guilty of both. What I’m asking is: why is there an influx of films and television with virtuosic filmmaking on display but a wanting-lack of any cohesive message or meaning or point? To get down to the root of the issue, let’s first look at Nocturama.

Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama is a drama-thriller set in modern-day Paris. The plot is as follows: a group of young adults and teenagers execute a series of terror attacks across Paris and then hide out in a gigantic mall until the authorities inevitably discover where they are and proceed to kill all of them. The plot is simple enough as a sentence, but the film takes upward of 50 minutes to make any of this clear. The first 50 or so minutes feature multiple stories taking place simultaneously, with timestamp inserts giving a basic chronology of events, all of which culminate in the terror attack. The issue with this is that the film doesn’t make clear what is happening for those first 50 minutes. It’s easy enough to deduce after the first few scenes that although none of these characters are talking to one another it’s clear that they are united in a common task, and that that task has something to do with packages and bags that each of them are picking up from various clandestine locations, and that these packages and the behavior that the kids display lead the viewer to deduce that what these kids are doing is illegal. All of this is guesswork left up to the viewer, which is an entirely valid and reasonable tactic for filmmaking when that’s the point of the movie, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for this film. The obfuscation of events doesn’t inform or expand the meaning of what is happening; it just hampers understanding of the movie on the most fundamental level. It feels like Bonello took the saying “show, don’t tell,” as literal, meaning that showing something as a visual is always better than having people talk; a critical misunderstanding I have found applicable to far too many movies. The frustrating part of it all is that a simple editing change, moving a dialogue scene between all the characters that takes place at the 50-minute mark to a point earlier in the film, would have solved most of this movie’s clarity issues. This wouldn’t have fixed the lack of purpose or point in the story, but it at least would have made the story presented easily understood and followed – this isn’t to say that it’s impossible to pick up on these story elements through context, it’s just that this method is problematic in how it treats mystery vs. obfuscation.

After the terror attack, all the kids – except for one who just never shows up and another one who is shot during the bomb planting – end up in a closed, wonderland-mall to hide out. This section of the film is the most interesting part, but it’s also unfortunately crippled from the start. Because the first 50-minutes fail so spectacularly to establish any dramatic connection to the characters, by the time they made it to the mall I genuinely could not for the life of me remember even one of their names; this problem persisted throughout the rest of the film, resulting in my inability, still, to name a single character in the movie. While the interactions between the kids in this section are interesting – the mall turns out to be a fantastic location for displaying characters’ personalities through simple decisions like what clothes to steal or what to occupy their time with – the lack of dramatic weight makes the whole act feel flat and lifeless. Accompanying this act is the knowledge that because of the sloppiness of the terror attack, it’s obvious that the kids stand no chance of getting away with it. In a better movie, this could work to add a layer of tension to every scene, turning moments of levity and joy into perversely sinister indicators of the inevitable ending to come. Rather than imbue otherwise innocuous scenes with a subtle fatalism, this section just feels like more treading water before the end.

And when the ending finally does come, what should be the starkest reiteration of the film’s point, ends up being a lifeless – albeit excellently directed – scene in which all the kids die. What can be picked out of the plot is that the purpose behind these terror attacks has something to do with economic anxiety in France. With a setup like that, a climax in which police murder all of the kids in a mall, a shrine to capitalism, would be one hell of a thematic statement, and yet this film manages to waste the potential of the moment because of the lack of built investment and functional storytelling throughout the entire movie. This last act ended up encapsulating my ultimate takeaway: the film features set pieces and dramatic situations that in a more skilled storytellers hand could have become iconic scathing criticisms of culture, capitalism, and the modern era, but in Bonello’s hands end up being limp suggestions of ideas with no real gravitas or meaning.

So why doesn’t it work? What does this film not get, that it should have?

There is a tendency in storytelling to treat mystery and obfuscation as synonymous. This equivalency is a critical misunderstanding, and it’s a misconception that this film takes to heart. A mystery can act as a propulsive hook for the viewer to become invested, but obfuscation only serves to mystify what turns out to be a straightforward and trite story. 50s Noir films mastered the understanding of this delineation. Those movies hooked you in with a mystery but never obfuscated what exactly was happening in the plot at any given moment; the pieces were there, and they were explicit and understandable, you just didn’t know how they all fit together yet. David Lynch is another filmmaker that understands this crucial difference; all his films feature mysteries as their hook, but Lynch never obfuscating the steps the characters take in solving those mysteries; and more importantly with Lynch, the mystery is never the point, just the framework within which the point is explored. When a story mistakes mystery and obfuscation as being synonymous, I can’t help but be infuriated when I finally understand the events of the film only to realize that they’re so simplistic and banal that I can sum the entire plot up in a single sentence. Obfuscation isn’t compelling storytelling; it’s treading water. Once the viewer understands the story of Nocturama, the previous obfuscation for the first 50-minutes only serves to infuriate (this is true in my case, at least). This new understanding lends itself to another understanding: with the veil lifted from the film’s plot, and the plot revealed to be rather simple, the viewer has only one question left: what the hell is the point of it all? Nocturama offers 50-minutes of obfuscated storytelling, and then the rest of the runtime is spent with characters walking around a mall, and I cannot for the life of me parse what it all means. I genuinely didn’t understand it. I knew what happened, but I didn’t know why I should care about what happened. I didn’t get the point; I didn’t get what it was trying to say, I didn’t get why this film was made; nothing clicked. I’ll be the first to admit, maybe I don’t understand the context or social commentary on display in the movie – it is a French film about France, and I am an American, so this could be the culprit – but regardless of the possibility of misunderstanding, the lack of a clear point, or an unearth-able one discoverable on repeat viewing (I watched this movie twice), is inexcusable. I watch massive amounts of foreign films – hell, I’ve probably watched more anime than anyone reading this article (Japanese culture isn’t exactly a one-to-one with America), and that’s not a hyperbole; I would bet on it – and I’ve never been unable to connect or understand the purpose or story at hand. My favorite director is David Lynch, so it’s not like I’m unwilling to put in the work to understand a film. The issue is that, as is the case with Nocturama, when something is so bereft of any arrangeable elements to form a coherent point, so desolate in the way of semiotic or just basic metaphorical understanding – note that this doesn’t have to be a point or message or purpose that I agree with, just one that is understandable given a little work – it just leaves me with the feeling that I wasted the last however-many hours I spent watching the thing. So that leads to another question: why am I seeing more and more films and television that fall victim to these shortcomings?

It’s not like there are suddenly more films like this. These movies have always existed. The difference, a least as I see it, is that our advancements in technical understanding and prowess have led to these movies looking impeccable while being vapid time-sinks. In the past, a film like this wouldn’t look nearly as good as it does. In fact, the lack of technical polish most often warned of the increasing possibility that what you’re watching might just be trite nonsense. This understanding didn’t apply in all cases – i.e., Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead, etc. – but it certainly helped to weed out the muddled from the masterful. That isn’t the case anymore. While Film schools have gotten fantastic at churning out technical monsters, they aren’t imbuing those technicians with the same skill level of fundamental human storytelling. I don’t mean to say that it’s bad that movies look better than they ever have; it’s not. The issue is that the filmmakers’ skills aren’t balanced between aesthetic/textural beauty and brass-tacks storytelling prowess. This entire imbalance leads to a bigger problem: when films feature virtuosic filmmaking, it’s much easier to mistake the virtuosity on display as actual meaning; these films easily intoxicate and entrance the audience while imparting nothing of substance. This allegation may seem harsh, but it’s beyond frustrating to watch a movie like Nocturama which features such incredible control and understanding of all the technical aspects of the physical act of filmmaking while lacking any semblance of a message or coherent purpose for the film’s existence. It’s wasted potential, and it depresses me. And the problem isn’t going away, in fact, it’s multiplying. La La Land, a film that meant a whole hell of a lot to me when it came out last year, is an example of a movie with such beautiful technical understanding of what it is – its knowledge of musical form is staggering – that when you stop and realize that what it does doesn’t justify what it wants to be with coherent earned storytelling, the whole thing starts to come apart at the seams. I forgive La La Land for a lot of its shortcomings because of what it did for me when it came out, but I find that forgiving attitude running out with other more egregious examples. Stranger Things might have entranced audiences with the artifice of that thing you miss – that thing being 80s adventure movies with the kids on bikes, cul-de-sacs, and fantastical monster – but at the end of it all, all the show had was an artifice, a tone; it understood what it wanted to be, but it didn’t know how to earn it.

Jurassic World and Rogue One both fall into the previously defined category. Both films know what they want to be, but both only execute the aesthetic and textural qualities of that end goal without recreating the functional storytelling of what they are trying to emulate. Jurassic Park works because of the amount of time spent building the characters and the stakes; Spielberg knew when to let the dinosaurs out. Jurassic World is an overeager kid that accidentally squishes his new pet frog, meaning well but failing to do it. Rogue One is a movie that had specific scenes and moments it wanted to show, and then built bridges between them and called it a story. It fails to understand any of the basics that Lucas nailed in A New Hope, and it lacks the dramatic stakes-ratcheting that let Empire be so dark.

The worst offender of this philosophy is J.J. Abrams, who’s movies manage to exude the textural in-the-moment whimsy and delight we remember from Spielberg classics without any understanding of how it was that Spielberg not only entranced but drilled into memory those moments of emotional levity, and how he sold the cathartic, storybook endings. Spielberg’s classics – E.T., Jurassic Park, Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc. – all work because of his intense acuity for the nuances of storytelling: how to hook you, how to tell the story, how to imbue meaning and purpose into every scene, every shot, every moment, and how to leave you with the eternal memory of what you just saw. These essential storytelling elements were then married with deft precision to filmmaking techniques and brought to life on screen. Spielberg is a technical savant, but he’s also virtuosic, and experienced, at the fundamental level of storytelling. He puts in the hard work to make his films have weight. The same can’t be said of Abrams. His films want to delight you at the moment to moment action – a never-ending, dragon-chasing upper – but they fail to connect those individual textures and tones with functional stories to create a greater meaning. What’s worse, his characters are often a forgettable amalgamation of momentary personalities without coherent psychologies; like the stories they’re in, they appear to be something they aren’t. All of this causes the final product to feel like the kind of movie you love while being a sequence of semi-connected, mostly separate feel-good moments.

Abrams, Stranger Things, La La Land, Jurassic World, Rogue One, and Nocturama all know what they want to be, and they know that they have the skill to portray what they want to be on screen, but they have no idea how to depict it in a meaningful and earned way through the story; there is no human/audience connection to the actual events and characters in the film, only fleeting and momentary feelings.

So, what does this all say about Nocturama, and more importantly the future of film as a medium?

Nocturama is a beautiful movie, but it doesn’t say much. I think there is an appropriate comparison to be made between it and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, but unlike that movie, which is saying something (how effectively it says it is a different conversation all-together), Nocturama exists in a realm of disconnected imagery and vacuous seductiveness. The movie – featuring an ensemble of excellent actors, a story featuring teenagers committing acts of terror, and a climax in which police murder everyone in romantic fashion – has the possibility of saying something; what it would like to say, neither I nor it seems Nocturama, knows. While movies like Nocturama and Rogue One, and shows like Stranger Things are propagating and selling the surface aesthetic of profundity, the future of film is not bleak. For every film that fits this mold, we get a Raw or Swiss Army Man or Get Out or Colossal.

I’d like to take a moment here at the end to point out a filmmaker who not only has a solid grasp of the technical aspects of filmmaking – his directorial debut demonstrates this for the first time – but also has a stalwart grip on the storytelling that sells the technical soiree. Taylor Sheridan is the most exciting new screenwriter in the past few years. With the triple threat of Sicario, Hell or High Water, and now Wind River – a film which demonstrates his ability to marry story, characters, and directing – Sheridan represents a torrent of raw talent and human storytelling that inspires immense hope in me. The degree to which each of these films is successful in what they set out to accomplish is debatable, but what isn’t is the genuine effort to try and make a point, to depict something he clearly believes is important and worth saying, worth putting on a screen, in each film he has written so far; there is a clarity of purpose and an audacity to explore subjects that haven’t seen huge representation on screen in each of these films. His characters are memorable, and his messages are parseable. He represents the best of both worlds – excellent technician and functional storyteller – in a way that makes me want to see everything he tries his hand at making. Sheridan is the opposite of the problem; he represents the solution to it.