#BEYOND TWO SOULS MOVIE#

He made even his absurd lines (“ I have defeated Death, Jodie! ”) sing.

And Willem Dafoe is masterful as Dawkins. Jodie, Page, is perfect when channeling frustration, anxiety and sadness. It’s fitting that Ryan is played by Eric Winter, human mannequin, best known as Rex DiMera on Days of Our Lives: a living symbol of romance brought in to dance around stiffly as Jodie’s Love Interest. The break happens when Jodie weeps after Aiden has willfully ruined a dinner-date with Ryan, and we hover above her as Aiden, cold and silent, offering no warmth or connection. It happened when I walked through a submarine with a portal to the spirit world and all the souls of the dead, and I saw the crewmembers idling in the t.v. While I believed in Jodie and Dawkins in some scenes, in others, their movements struck as tinny, hollow. Just as Jodie drew me into feeling for her, her joints jerked about unnaturally, or she said some stilted line, or she kissed someone awkwardly without lead-in, or she was possessed by a ghost. The sight is disturbing, for one, and in that moment, I’m also cut off from her. I had to close my eyes during these segments, in which Jodie’s eyes roll back to show their milky whites. As Aiden, I “inhabit” Jodie, and she uses her psychic energy to move him through buildings, eavesdrop on conversations and read the memories of others. I pull the strings on Jodie’s limbs in the direction she’s already moving, an unseen hand held on mine to commandeer the action. It was hard to not feel insulted by the all caps-lock “MOVE THE STICK DOWN,” barking at me to follow boring steps through preciously orchestrated scenes. Jodie cries out at Ryan, at Nathan: I’m sick of being your puppet! What am I to you? A toy?īeyond’s player angles Jodie and Aiden to fulfill a number of limited movements, with the impact of choices largely sealed in the chapter you are in: walk here, run there, turn over tables, flick lights on and off. The one person who wanted Jodie to live her own life-her birth mother-is conveniently placed in a lifelong coma by the government. Everyone in this world-from Jodie’s adopted family, to the grim Dawkins, to Ryan, to the CIA, to the whole government, wants to puppeteer Jodie towards their ends. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Alexander, wandering a house in the middle of the night, finds a puppet warehouse, and listens to God-played by a puppet-speak.īeyond is just such a puppet warehouse and you are the sleazy puppetmaster.

#BEYOND TWO SOULS MOVIE#

The movie I thought most about during Beyond was the baroque Ingmar Bergman epic Fanny and Alexander, another piece of fiction about ghosts and spirits traipsing around the living. The actor collapses into her chair and her sound people, her script people, her makeup people, close around her like wings. The movie, after all, is a production, the work of multiple teams working, one hopes, in harmony. Digital Ellen Page must submit to the system of story, mechanic, narrative.ĭigital Ellen Page must submit to the system of story, mechanic, narrative. I remembered more often-precisely because this is a game that banks on its replication of reality-that she wasn’t real. This face is a mask and her digital body is a vessel, and for all her life-like being, she is not Ellen Page. Yet though there were many moments I believed I was watching Ellen Page, I felt unmoved and cold after spending so much time with her. All its surface beauty given to us in this asymptotic approach to life. We have watched this face that we haven’t earned such closeness to, such intimacy with, emoting exhaustively in thousands of scenes. We can count every mole, each pore in her upturned nose, each individual hair in her brows, the smirk lines around her mouth. Her hazel eyes catch light from four different sources. I felt like a surgeon and an art appraiser and a voyeur in one, seeing her precisely rendered so close. After I actually finished the game, I gazed at elfin Ellen Page’s sharp, little face on the title screen. In her teens, she’s asked to join the CIA, under Ryan Clayton. She is transferred to a lab and lives under the auspices of paranormal researcher Nathan Dawkins, played by Willem Dafoe, and Cole Freeman, his assistant. People hate her for her freakish ability.

She suffers a terrible childhood and adolescence and is unable to live a normal life. Her Ghost Pal, Aiden, is linked to her through a plasmic thread. Jodie Holmes, played by Ellen Page, is a girl born with the Gift of Ghost.

Beyond two souls