Kathryn Bigelow’s grim neo-noir sci-fi thriller, set in the near future of virtually enhanced voyeurism.
An ex-cop turned street hustler gets into the business of dealing virtual experiences, extracted directly from subjects' brains. Sinking deeper into the world of bootlegged stimuli, he comes across a perverse experiential recording of a crime so gruesome, that it can never be unseen.
Strange Days is Kathryn Bigelow’s virtual-reality age contribution to the great line of self-referential films analysing the visual pleasures drawn from the act of watching, which includes Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Interrogating the seemingly harmless promise of empathy posed by VR technology, Strange Days asks uncomfortable questions about other, more sinister sources of the desire to observe, and feel what others feel. Looking at the embodied experiential nature of Virtual Reality, the movie explores the psychological repercussions of having third-hand experiences as vivid as your very own.
