I’ve never seen another human being eat an ice cream cone the way Jeff Bridges eats one in this movie. Instead of licking or taking measured little bites, he opens wide and puts the entire scoop in his mouth, like how a python would eat ice cream, then takes it out again.

I’ve been having a Bad Time recently, and this is a beautiful movie about the crushing ambivalence of bad times, lost identity, living at the mercy of corporate and political figureheads who can never really look you in the eye. Paranoid and jazzy, like Inherent Vice in a minor key. In ten years, people will be mad at me for saying this is the best movie ever made about covid (is there any competition?), but I don’t care.

I couldn’t tell if I liked the movie at first. Then, when I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, trying to piece it all back together with a strange, disproportionate urgency —it’s as if the venom at the center of the parable kicks in with a delay. With this in mind, I hope it’s not too crass to mention that several of the people involved with the film, including Tarkovsky and the actor who plays The Writer, died years later, at relatively young ages, probably due to exposure to toxic waste while filming on location.