World-premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, in the “Laugh” section, More Life, written and directed by Bradley Banton, is not your average film. Its 78 minutes are a long Instagram Live stream, including comments that appear on screen as the events unfold. The film focuses on a group of old friends who reunite to celebrate the fact that one of them is opening a gallery show in Copenhagen, and the main bulk of the feature is based on the interactions among them. In the cast are Tuwaine Barrett (seen in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths [+leggi anche:
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More Life is an interesting experiment: can everything be turned into a film? The answer is: not necessarily. And that’s not because we’re watching an Instagram Live-style movie shot on a phone. If anything, that’s the most interesting thing about it. It’s because we’re looking at a product that never manages to feel like anything more than an Instagram Live. Why should we spend over an hour watching something that, on our phones, we’d likely scroll past after five minutes? This opens up another layer of the issue. The average human attention span has dropped alarmingly, and we need to face up to that. Films are still resisting the pandemic of the glut of short-form content, but the struggle to capture audiences in the same way as was possible before the explosion in social media is more acutely felt with every day that passes. So, the real question becomes: if we’re turning short content into a film, how do we make it watchable for longer? The answer is: by providing something that genuinely hooks the person and glues their eyes to the screen. This is something that Banton’s film, unfortunately, is unable to do. A lot of movies today are trimmed into shorter forms on platforms like TikTok or Instagram, and people come away feeling as though they’ve already seen them after flicking through just a reel or two. In this context, a bridge between the two forms of content is indeed very interesting, but it can also represent a risky choice – failure is a very real prospect.

More Life is surely deserving of praise for its original approach to cinema, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be mistaken for a great product simply because of its revolutionary idea. This is unfortunate because the protagonists are genuinely funny – but only if you spend the right amount of time with them. After a while, though, a feeling sets in that makes you wonder: do we really need this? In a world where choosing what to watch from an almost infinite pile of audiovisual material has become a statement in itself, More Life stumbles in its attempt to convince, despite its courage. The believability and spontaneity of the performances are praiseworthy, as is the intention to depict a slice of black British life and the bonds within a close group of friends. Yet it can’t be ignored that the film’s clunky rhythm – even if some well-timed humour occasionally injects some energy into proceedings – prevents More Life from reaching its audience in the way it was intended to.

More Life was self-funded by Banton and was backed by Michael Fassbender’s DMC Film.