It is hard to say what impressed us most in ‘Loss of Reality‘: the way the director approaches the theme itself illustrating the personal failure of a drug addict, the miserable authenticity of the intimate world of those who lost confidence in ideals or the oneiric imagery through which the lens of the camera penetrates the hot core of the protagonist’s delirium. Regardless of the personal hierarchies of each viewer, Martin Holper’s project is a performance that has enough potential to compete against some of the best films focusing on what addiction is. Despite the evident and inevitable similarities between this project and the already established features, Martin Holper’s universe excels precisely in the eclecticism of the aforementioned dimensions, combining in the same fictional space Darren Aronofsky’s emotional viscerality with the bizarre spontaneity of David Lynch. Thus, the substance of this short film feeds simultaneously from several tendencies and genres that orbit around the drama-horror couple pushing the viewer’s perception sometimes to extremes impossible to predict. Not by accident, the surrealistic inflections that translate the physical and emotional convulsions of the protagonist often induce the audience a similar feeling with claustrophobia, contributing to a varied and almost organic sensory experience.
Despite his promises, Momo, a young and irresponsible man, cannot give up his drug addiction. As a consequence, his actions make people around him to move away, since they are powerless regarding the narcotics’ magnetism. However, one special drug Momo has just consumed will carry the protagonist in a hallucinating voyage at the end of which he may have the last chance to choose between good and evil, between life and death.
Built on the principles of heterogeneous stylistics that glide unexpectedly from the outer and raw reality towards the delusional torrent of the main character, Martin Holper’s short film erases the conventional boundaries between wakefulness and dream, between truth and lie, between emotion and physical pain. Indeed, the varied props used by the director may have enough symbolic load to feed a series of adjacent metaphorical interpretations, but beyond all these elements, ‘Loss of Reality’ is a short film that doesn’t necessarily touch the viewer through the sophisticated aspect of its stage design, but through the desperate search of the protagonist for his own humanity.
For the professionalism with which the director melts varied inflections of cinematic discourse in the matter of an intense short film and for the imaging impact that generates an almost overwhelming organic experience, ‘Loss of Reality’ was awarded with the Film of the Month distinction in the March 2019 edition of TMFF.
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