Homo Sapiens

There is no narrator, no music and no interview in Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 2016 documentary. The film shows abandoned spaces one after another: emptied shopping centres, evacuated hospitals, flooded cinemas, disused launch pads. The camera does not move; every shot is static, long and close to symmetrical. The sound design is the real narrator. Wind, dripping water, cracking metal, birds. You hear what continues where people are absent. Geyrhalter never names the places, which range across continents; you do not know where you are, and that is deliberate. The film advances no thesis but it has one clear question: what remains after us. Its only answer is duration. Looking, for ninety minutes, is the entire argument. Who it's for: viewers who like slow cinema and observational documentary. Who it's not for: viewers wanting information, context or narrative; there is not one explanatory sentence here, and that can feel tedious.