At some point the audience of this film has to shout at the screen or the screen with clenched fists: “That's it!

They can't do that! ”Righteous outrage boils over when a dull housewife bitterly blackens the heroine Cee, who at this point had to endure sexualized assault, a slander campaign and total social downgrading:“ And she despises the family! “This is an infamous perversion;

the heroine only said that she was lovingly prepared for growing up by her father and that nothing is wrong with her, even though she had to do without a traditional family connection.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the features section.

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In the narrative of the television play "Hyperland" with scenes like this one, any hope of an improvement in the situation is systematically erased and crushed. The theme that Mario Sixtus, author and director, stages here is the triangulation of digitization, division of labor and the mob mentality. The film belongs to the science fiction genre, but it knows something that this genre did not know in earlier phases of its exploration of the networked computer world. At the beginning of this dispute, namely in the sixties and seventies of the last century, between the appearance of Harlan Ellison's short story “'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman ”(1965) and Michael Ende's novel“ Momo ”(1973), shaped speculative narration above all the fear that new, computing machines would make us one of their own:cold and logical, without emotions. This was intended as an analogy to industrialization, whose machine park had, as is well known, pushed people into the piecework and onto the assembly line, subject to the work cycle of devices. However, since the so-called social media have unleashed their enormous potential for disaster, we have known that computers do not necessarily dry out people's emotional lives, but can also stimulate them to tap new sources of profit and whip them to completely mindless arousal heights.that computers do not necessarily dry up people's emotional lives, but can also stimulate them to tap new sources of profit and whip them to completely mindless levels of excitement.that computers do not necessarily dry up people's emotional lives, but can also stimulate them to tap new sources of profit and whip them to completely mindless levels of excitement.

Messages are emblazoned on all the house walls

The fictional world design of “Hyperland” makes this insight the echoing background of the action: Interfaces between virtuality and unarmed sensory experience sit as stimulus-reaction transceivers in every head;

All house walls and other urban surfaces are projection platforms for advertising, political and social agitation as well as water level reports regarding social karma, the measurable and countable amount of which, determined in interactions with fellow human beings, not only decides on access to all kinds of amenities, but also on whether a person still enjoys full civil rights at all or instead “fades” until they are drowned in the noise of the great gossip about everything and nothing.

From the real jungle of heating and ventilation pipes to the feeds of virtual party rooms, sometimes gaudy and graffiti-like, sometimes alienated with a strange pixel patina, the film shows us neighborhoods for a future rotoscopy of psychological inner life.

It is seldom seen that a German production, measured by foreign standards such as the BBC show “Black Mirror”, has to be as ashamed of itself as “Hyperland”.

The effects that the film releases in the heart and mind would of course not be felt half as clearly, even with all the security of the staging, right down to the effects control, if Sixtus had been less fortunate with his leading actress and also with his colleague who plays her mortal enemy.

Lorna Ishema as indomitable Cee, who even in the horror of interface consumption, does not play the game of power and mass, works her way through the evil social pulp of her narrow space of action with a painful presence; and Maximilian Pekrul, whose windy bastard Marvin exploits the gruesome principle that nothing gives a psychopath with the necessary means as much security as a public who believes the truth is a lie, changes its colors between horny sausage and James Bond -Film villain, until you understand that the real evil in the post-Twitter world doesn't have “no face”, but far too many situational, occasional, opportunistic faces. In acting, effect and conception, "Hyperland" builds a warning about events that have already happened on the one hand,On the other hand, the consequences of which can perhaps be changed before we no longer know how bad we are because of them.

Hyperland

runs today at midnight on ZDF.