Something to watch tonight: Friday 22 August

Gut Instinct (Dillaman, 2024)

This week marks the 500^th edi­tion of this news­let­ter, so we are cel­eb­rat­ing by offer­ing a 50% dis­count on full-year sub­scrip­tions. That equates roughly to 15c for every edi­tion that lands in your inbox four days a week.

If you don’t feel up to a paid sub at this point in time — in this eco­nomy — you could use the but­ton below to recom­mend us to your friends and rela­tions. The top recom­mend­er will get a prize!

New Zealand is a small coun­try and the cre­at­ive com­munity is pretty well-connected. That can make review­ing loc­al work chal­len­ging as rela­tion­ships are both import­ant and fragile.

I try and acknow­ledge whenev­er I review some­thing that has been made by — or stars — someone who I con­sider a friend. Sometimes you watch some­thing and you just have to say, “Yeah … he’s a mate.”

But there are also times when you watch some­thing and you just have to exclaim, “Yeah! He’s a mate!”

Gut Instinct is one of those. Produced, writ­ten, dir­ec­ted and edited by Doug Dillaman, it’s one of those film exper­i­ences that is so sin­gu­lar that if you ever find your­self watch­ing some­thing sim­il­ar, you’ll have to say, “Yup, they’ve def­in­itely seen Gut Instinct”. They’d have to be pretty brave to try, though, as the film has been a labour of … maybe not love exactly, but cer­tainly obses­sion for over five years.

It’s a pro­ject that has grown and blos­somed — dare I say it, mutated — over that time and has now arrived as a home view­ing option after a series of spe­cial road­show screen­ings presided over by Doug himself.

The film is set either in the future or a dysto­pi­an altern­at­ive present. Mankind is almost erad­ic­ated by an infest­a­tion of intel­li­gent intest­in­al bac­teria from space. The audi­ence are the lucky sur­viv­ors, about to under­go a pro­ced­ure to remove the last traces of the invaders and attempt to restart civil­isa­tion. But first, we must be pre­pared, and the film is an inform­a­tion­al doc­u­ment­ary out­lining — mostly — how we got here and also what’s going to hap­pen next.

Periodic purges are required and at the in-person screen­ings the audi­ence was giv­en some con­sum­able props to help things along. If you are watch­ing at home, I recom­mend you pre­pare some morsels of your own to join in with.

Constructed from a vora­cious trawl through the pub­lic domain pub­lic inform­a­tion films that the United States gov­ern­ment and busi­nesses pro­duced in enorm­ous volume in the 50s and 60s, with the addi­tion of antique med­ic­al text­book dia­grams and some very amus­ing explan­at­ory anim­a­tion by Liam Maguren, Gut Instinct is a feast. It’s dense, intel­li­gent — Doug says that it is roughly 60% sci­en­tific­ally accur­ate — and often hilarious.

Here’s a trailer:

Where to watch Gut Instinct

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision

Rest of the world: Just you wait and see …