The recent and current experience of the pandemic has become such a delicate issue that it is almost impossible to say precisely what is really scary for all of us: the virus itself or its media coverage? Although an experimental short film designed like a nightmare lacking conventional narrative concreteness, ‘Epic Epidemic‘ has a striking accuracy while it is inspired by the infernal noise of panic beyond the walls to suggest an unbearable state of mind. Anders Bigum captures in his project a fragment of the broadcasted madness of the world gripped by the fever of inexplicable terror, illustrating through a character the anguish and the state of cloistering induced by the media that adorn (willingly or not?) the real facts with disturbing ostentation. Without creating a short film tackling in a concrete way the COVID context, the director aims to depict the general typology of a media consumer, drawing the sliding towards the collective madness of a world that either vehemently rejects everything it cannot understand or adopts a hyperbolic attitude regarding the events.
Anders Bigum also offers us a kind of shocking insight into the anatomy of a TV addiction that, on the one hand, provides the viewer with the necessary dose of “bread and circuses” and, on the other hand, manages to shatter the emotional comfort of the human incapable to discern the truth and the media’s acts of manipulation. This sudden plunge into the cacophony of a widespread panic takes place inside an apartment that, in fact, suggests the disorder of the character’s mind. Between shrill, almost stroboscopic lights, twilight colours and chaotic camera movements, this project gives us an almost Lynchian feeling while blurring the boundaries between reality and exaggerated fiction. Perhaps a greater courage on the part of the director to approach a more visceral visual style would have made this experience much more memorable. However, ‘Epic Epidemic’ is an experimental short film that, although indigestible to many viewers, authentically captures the true scourge of the contemporary world that is most likely not a virus, but our own imagination.
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