Clinging to Lost Innocence
"Anesthesia" is a short film written by John Harden and directed by Jeff Osborne. The film follows Michael, a wealthy businessman who tries to make sense of why he is trapped in a childhood memory and why his mother is trying to coerce sensitive information from him.
Anesthesia's story shares many similarities with Christopher Nolan's 2010 "Inception." Like Inception, Anesthesia drops the viewer into a world where technology allows the infiltration of the mind. In Inception the mind is explored through dreams. Anesthesia does it by way of a technology where the mind can be explored while a patient is under medical anesthesia. Also like Inception, the film involves a bit of corporate espionage, where unsavory characters attempt to use the mind exploration technology for sensitive data exfiltration. The conflict in the narrative is driven by this story construction. Will Michael be emotionally manipulated by the childhood memory of his mother and him not wanting to disappoint her? Will this lead him to divulge damaging information? The film builds tension as it answers these questions and explores Michael's morality.
To ground viewers in the mechanics of the film's strange world, Jeff Osborne presents the mind exploration technologies through familiar interfaces for technology. Data exfiltration in the simulated world is expressed through an app on an iPad-inspired tablet. The device that enables the mind exploration looks like an Apple-esque device fixed to Michael's head. Osborne's direction guides the viewer not just through the magic-like technology that underpins the film's story, but also through Michael's character. Michael is introduced not at his current age, but as a child (played by Arthur Waite) with child-like innocence. Osborne is careful to present Michael sympathetically, a boy whose head rests gently on the lap and under the safe and reassuring hand of his mother. He then subverts this image by swapping the innocent Michael for his middle-age version as his mother transitions from being caring and giving to manipulative and demanding.
The elder Michael's performance by Aaron Staton presents a dynamic individual. As the narrative reveals more about who Michael is, Staton supports it through his expressions of Michael's confusion, suspicion, vulnerability, and arrogance. This is set against Marianne Noscheze's performance as Michael's mother. She curves the performance contours of the nostalgic memory of a mother who is also robotic in the way artificial intelligence offers an uncanny valley mimicry. She does this while displaying just enough humanity and emotion to convince Michael (and the viewer) that some part of his mother may be somewhere in her simulated representation. Staton and Noscheze's performances play well against each other as Michael swings between trusting and distrusting his simulated mother as she manipulates him to get what her puppeteers want from him.
The majority of the film is set in the simulated childhood memory where the cinematography has a dreamy but vintage quality. This juxtaposition makes the film feel visually off-kilter, reinforcing the artificial and fallacious nature of the simulated world and the characters. This is expressed in other ways. Michael's mother is too perfect and put together with her perfect makeup and perfect hair and perfectly worn 70s-esque bathing suit on a sunny beach day. Quick cuts and flashes of old film reel and 8mm footage suggest that what the viewer is seeing is or may be some sort of memory.
The off-kilter aesthetics, duplicitous characters, and Osborne's unfolding of the narrative of deception and manipulation supports the underlying theme of Anesthesia. In the film, Michael implores his mother to protect him. He tells her that he is not a bad person. But as the viewer learns more about Michael, it appears he is not as innocent a person as he was when he was a boy. The film expresses that people and the organizations they belong to may at first seem innocuous, but beneath the surface lie their nefarious dealings. Though they cling to the innocence of their childhood and the validation of their loved ones, that is a simulated reality they create to paper over who they really are.