Where do online chat rooms, virtual reality, Schubert, Goethe, Shakespeare and the Japanese recluse phenomenon of hikikomori come together to rub shoulders? If you’ve seen Polish director Jan Komasa’s new film, then you know the answer to this riddle: The Suicide Room.

Komasa’s techno-drama offers a disturbing view into the life of a young man, Dominik, who loses himself in a dangerous virtual reality after being ostracized at school. The actor Jakub Gierszał, a rising star of Polish cinema, invests the lead character with angst and anger in a physical, yet gracefully understated, performance. He is convincing without having to convince.

The film opens in the opera house in present-day Warsaw, where Dominik and his parents listen as a tenor performs Franz Schubert’s haunting Lied, “Der Doppelganger.” Schubert, of course, was one of the great Romantic composers, and he set the music for “Der Doppelganger” to a poem by Heinrich Heine, who himself had a complicated relationship to Romanticism.

The idea of a doppelganger—literally, “spirit-double”—plays a central role in a film that pays due attention to the modern approach to identity construction. It is no surprise that Komasa modeled his Suicide Room—the virtual community for which the film is named—off the online virtual world called Second Life, where users create their own avatars and set about doing all the things one might do on a street laid with concrete: meet friends at cafés, attend grand galas, and fall madly in love, all without stepping away from their computer screen.

Buttoned-down critics of modern society can dismiss this fantasy world as pure escapism, but to do so is to ignore an ever-more-firmly entrenched truth: there is no separating the online world from the world of flesh. Recent stories of cyber bullying, such as the cases of Megan Meier and Jamey Rodemeyer, both of whom committed suicide after being harassed online, have led to old-fashioned pen-and-paper legislation, meaning those who abuse others by typing epithets on their keyboard are rewarded with jail time in a very real prison cell. In other words, with consequences in the real world, a movie in large part about virtual reality should not be treated as science fiction. This caveat bears mentioning because such a categorization is probably the first instinct of any viewer who does not have his own Second Life account.

Komasa highlights the inseparability of the two realms by seamlessly weaving in and out of them with a combination of slick editing and good writing. Dominik falls in love with a woman by first watching a disturbing self-mutilation video she has posted online, and then by chatting with her in the Suicide Room after their initial contact. His melancholic attraction to the cult of suicide, and glorification of death propagated in the Suicide Room among his new friends, is reminiscent of the most extreme form of Wertherism that became oddly fashionable after the publication, in 1774, of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sturm und Drang masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Today we construct our identities with tools that Goethe or Schubert could never have dreamed of, but our psychology, it seems, has remained quite the same.

Komasa’s film asks the question: Are we more honest to others and true to ourselves online or in person? It does not answer it. And rightly so, for the current generation of high school students, an answer is not easily apparent. For those who grew up without texting and Facebook and Second Life, this question may also be a difficult one. The 40-plus age group, recent studies tell us, is increasingly likely to use the internet for things like social networking or alternate reality gaming; they just might not be as deft as their children at it.

The film is notable for its acting. Agata Kulesza, as Dominik’s high-powered mother, lends a harsh humor and acerbic wit to her role, and the versatile Krysztof Pieczyński plays a clueless, but ultimately sympathetic, father so consumed by his ministerial job that the intricacies of family life are lost on him. Dominik, unable to connect with his aloof parents and finding himself friendless, locks himself in his room, preferring to navigate his world as an avatar – or perhaps, as his own doppelganger. Here the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori comes to mind. As unlikely as it may seem that Dominik’s parents would not extricate him from his room by force, the skeptic would be wise to investigate this practice in Japan, where as many as 50,000 souls have cut themselves off from society—for a period of at least six months. Comparatively, the hikikomori in The Suicide Room is almost inept, though no less chilling for its brevity.

Ultimately, some will cringe at the footage of online chatting, webcams, and social networking sites, but these elements of technology are as much a part of our everyday routine as the rotary telephone was half a century ago. As for those who fear that, as technology changes so rapidly, we are likely to view this film in a few years with embarrassment, it might help to have another peek at Psycho, the 1960 Hitchcock film which features a very famous telephone booth scene. It was a rotary telephone that Detective Argobas dialed in the darkness, of course; two years later, the first touch-tone telephone debuted at the 1962 World’s Fair. However, I doubt anybody is laughing yet at that scene in Psycho, and there’s no reason to think The Suicide Room will ever become the butt of a techno-joke, either. It stands firmly as an insightful psychological portrait very much entrenched in the realia of the modern world.

Jan Komasa discussed this issue, among others, with GALO after the screening.

GALO: How do you think your film was received tonight?

Jan Komasa: The same as in Poland. At the end of the movie there’s ten seconds of silence. It tells me every time what the viewing was. Here was silence. Its proof that people responded to the movie, got into it. I’m just at the beginning of this evening, so maybe I will get some opinions. I’m really interested in how people from the States—especially the States—receive the movie. From my little experience, I know that I am always trying as a director to find a way to review my work. I’m trying to kind of go and meet with the viewers. So, I’m really interested in [the] opinions of the viewers here, so [that] maybe I can improve my work later on.

GALO: The ending is quite unusual. The film closes with footage, shot from a cell phone, of Dominik calling out for his mother as he dies on the floor of a nightclub bathroom. How did you arrive at that ending?

JK: At the end of the movie we were experimenting. And to have [the cell phone footage] at the end, it’s rare to end a movie like this. Basically there should be an ending and then an epilogue or something. Here there’s just an end, just a dot. The last scene is brutal, maybe a bit dirty in a way, because he dies in the toilet — dirty and brutal. The whole movie has more bloody sequences where you can say it’s disturbing, but the end; I wanted the end to be a really hot dot.

GALO: A previous film of yours, Ode to Happiness [Oda do radości], is about a hip-hop artist in Poland who wins a local radio contest. Your themes are quite fresh, quite current, but one of the dangers of doing something that’s very today is that tomorrow you can look very foolish. Is that something you worry about?

JK: Yes, that’s why I’m always trying to find an anchor, to find a base that’s always very universal in theme. Here I was inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. I feel that there’s kind of a big comeback of Romanticism in our culture, because of romantic pop music, Bad Romance, [the song by] Lady Gaga, and Lady Gaga wearing meat on herself, the Twilight Saga film series and all that. Vampires are, I guess, themselves a subject; this death fascination, it’s kind of related to Romanticism. I used a lot of Chopin music [in this film] and also Schubert… and all that Emo culture – Billy Talent, the Canadian band, they played on the soundtrack. I was trying to fill the movie with Romantic subjects, but classical Romantic subjects, maybe to find something opposite to modern times. If we have the two combined, [the film] will last, it will keep its freshness.

GALO: One of the most impressive aspects of the film is the seamless editing, the cuts between the virtual world and the real world, how the story weaves in and out so naturally.

JK: From the director’s point of view, that was the most crucial, most hard thing to do, to combine these. Some critic named it as a movie about colliding worlds. Maybe that’s the subject of the movie. The main problem as the director was to combine these in one movie. The real issue is to make them one. That was the toughest thing. We had a lot of ups and downs with it; we went back and forth, back and forth… We were watching the movie for a year just to combine it with animation, which was being made throughout the whole year, so then we were changing it.

GALO: What is your next project?

JK: My next project will be about the Warsaw Uprising, which was in 1944, a year after the Ghetto uprising in Warsaw. The people, after the Ghetto Uprising, were so upset because of the occupation by the Nazis that they wanted to make a big bang. It happened, and it was really bloody, it was a disaster in Poland, a human disaster, and the subject isn’t so much developed. It’s sort of like our own Vietnam. I want to say something new in Poland about the Polish war. We couldn’t do it because of 50 years of communism, now there’s an opportunity, and I was lucky enough to get funding.

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