Portuguese experimental filmmaker Edgar Pêra reanimates two literary giants, Fernando Pessoa and HP Lovecraft, in his latest work, Telepathic Letters [+leggi anche:
trailer
intervista: Edgar Pêra
scheda film], in order to explore the philosophical and artistic connections between them. This distinctive film, created entirely using artificial intelligence, fuses literature, technology and cinema. Pêra’s use of AI to generate the visuals results in a surreal aesthetic consistent with his established body of work. The film is screening out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

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Pêra has long been at the forefront of integrating advanced technology into his films, from his early experiments in 3D cinema to his more recent ventures with AI. His previous works reflect a deeper interest in both Pessoa and Lovecraft, and his movies are known for their surreal and often disorientating style, which aligns with his fascination with the unexpected and the avant-garde. This thematic and stylistic continuity is evident in Telepathic Letters, which extends his exploration of the legacies of both authors.

Telepathic Letters imagines a fictional correspondence between Pessoa and Lovecraft, drawing on their letters, essays, poems and fiction. Despite their vastly different backgrounds and philosophies – Pessoa’s introspective and fragmented poetic sensibility contrasts sharply with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and existential dread – Pêra identifies a shared preoccupation with the metaphysical, the unknown and the nature of creative work. The film plays with documentary conventions by presenting Pessoa and Lovecraft as “talking heads”, with each character’s appearance subtly altered in each “epistle” from relatively normal to grotesque and whimsical, one example being Lovecraft’s avatar appearing with dark, panda-like eyes encircled by cameras.

The protagonists are not conventional deepfakes, but rather creations of generative AI, meaning that their appearance changes according to the background and the AI’s “hallucinations”. This results in visual anomalies, such as Lovecraft’s eyes resembling dark camera lenses. The background of each “letter” is similarly fluid, featuring wild patterns or exaggerated scenes, like Lovecraft being surrounded by a large group of cats with hypnotic gazes, this being one of the more comical iterations.

Pêra pushes the boundaries by merging documentary reconstruction with a more essayistic approach, juxtaposing the thoughts of both writers in a fictional dialogue. He uses generative AI to visually interpret the concept of correspondence, leading to a series of bizarre vignettes – from vintage-style “photographs” of people encountering reptilian creatures to cubist deformations of faces and surreal distortions of reality, all rendered in a nightmarish aesthetic and culminating in apocalyptic imagery.

The film seamlessly shifts between documentary and portmanteau horror, and its multifaceted formalism could also be seen as a video-art piece – a collage of bizarre, unsettling and otherworldly imagery. It merges HR Giger’s penchant for the grotesque, particularly in relation to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, with René Magritte’s illusions of reality, reflecting Pessoa’s surrealistic tendencies, with dread and insanity as the central motifs of their imagined correspondence.

Pêra’s longstanding fascination for both writers also translates into an homage. However, his experiment with the convergence of multiple genres has further implications, serving as a proof of concept for the potential future genre of posthumous reanimations. This raises formalistic and ethical questions, such as where this evolutionary branch of post-cinema will lead to.

Telepathic Letters was produced by Bando à Parte, whose Rodrigo Areias currently handles the international sales, while discussions are under way with potential sales agents.