Ascension (2002)

directed by Karim Hussain
Canada
108 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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You may know Karim Hussain better as the cinematographer for several other very distinctive films, including Antiviral, Hobo With a Shotgun, Territoires, the recent and quietly successful We Are Still Here, and a couple of episodes of NBC's Hannibal. If you know him you know him: his sense of pervasive darkness is often the defining quality of a film, Hobo With a Shotgun excepted.

Ascension is an attempt to take on an absolutely massive concept: the murder of God at the hands of some other incredibly powerful entity, and the subsequent transformation of the entire human species into a race of little gods who can create miracles. Unsurprisingly, this is not used to mutual benefit- the world looks pretty grim. But I found it unrealistic that there wasn't actually more chaos, and it seemed like there were some unsaid rules to humanity's power. I would think that there wouldn't be any shortage of people who, for various reasons, would decide to end the human species as a whole if given boundless power. This alone is a great source of questions, because maybe if one person didn't want humanity to end, they alone could prevent multiple people from ending it? This is speculative fiction if ever there was any.

The one catch to such an immense and wide-reaching undertaking is that Ascension takes place essentially within the boundaries of a single stairwell in an impossibly tall building. This is actually what turned me off from watching the film for a very long time, but I don't want anybody else to feel the same way, because although the setting never changes much, it doesn't feel like it's confined to a stairwell. The three women ascending the stairs in order to kill whatever is at the top (which is implied to be God's murderer) converse among themselves in a way that not only offers us a bit of backstory on the world outside, but also a look into the prevailing worldview of the survivors of the "miracle plague" and, on an individual level, a look into the psyche of the women themselves.

There's a scene where all three women are in conversation where the actors are changed for a split second to completely different people, and the message behind this is fairly clear as far as I could see: that these people don't actually matter; the identity of whoever's going up those stairs to do that deed isn't a concern. The overwhelming feeling behind this movie is an utter disregard and even disgust for the physical, a statement of the meaninglessness of the body without action, the use of the body as nothing but a vessel for important actions to be performed.

I think this narrative works because there's so much left unsaid. The only time that ambiguity got on my nerves was the ending, which I felt was a little cliched and didn't seen satisfying, although I doubt if anything would have been given that this is basically 105 minutes of buildup. But the world this is based in, the bleakness of it and the uncertainty, is something that you can think about for longer than the movie runs.