There’s plenty of 80s nostalgia floating around in indie film these days, but it’s not often it comes in the form of something like Jesus Shows You The Way to the Highway (a title which, by the way, is only marginally relevant to what goes on here). Director and writer Miguel Llansó already has something of a name for the surreal, given his earlier ‘post-apocalyptic Ethiopian sci-fi’ film Crumbs (2015); here, he seems to be channelling the themes and issues behind Jacob’s Ladder, but refracting them through Jodorowsky. And is it enjoyable? Well, having reflected on the film for a couple of days, I still have no idea. It’s certainly different…
Such as it is, here’s the basic plot: the CIA, working against a kind of quasi-80s-Cold-War setting, are alarmed by the appearance of a Soviet virus and have to organise a pushback. They do this via the use of a rather rudimentary VR system, pitching its detectives into this gamer world to trace the virus source. Rather more conventionally, this is meant to be Agent Gagano’s last job; you can guess, then, that things are about to go badly wrong. Exploring an abandoned CPU to try and trace the virus before it takes over Psychobook (the VR) altogether, it turns out to be a trap and Gagano gets trapped in the game. In real life, this gives him a disastrous prognosis – a terminal coma. So he has to fight his way through the unsettlingly feverish virtual world, in order to get back to the real world.
A linear experience, this ain’t. The bizarre stylings of the VR world (right down to the characters’ avatars wearing paper masks and a high frame rate which makes all their movements jerky and unrealistic) are unsettling to watch, and the odd comic tics (the ‘Soviet’ avatar wearing a Stalin mask whilst speaking with a rich Irish brogue, for instance) are jokes unsure where to land. The film has a very ‘reality adjacent’ feel, and calls to mind that idea of the ‘hauntological’ which has so far been more associated with that peculiar seam of 70s nostalgia, bringing about odd reimaginings of the art, music and style of that decade. So here we are with 80s hauntology, a police drama set to blaring 8-bit soundtracks but permeated with analogue technological marvels, like Psychobook.
In essence, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is a puzzle solver – a guy fighting to get to the bottom of a situation which threatens him, before he runs out of time. It’s just that this happens against a strange backdrop; there’s certainly no lack of imagination here, it’s just that the path taken by that imagination dispenses with norms – oh, and there’s a hallucinogenic substance which features in part of the plot, as if things needed that extra dimension. Your level of engagement with, and enjoyment of, this journey will depend completely on your tolerance for very strange solutions to the offered puzzle. It’s not a film for everyone, it absolutely isn’t, but it has a kind of determination to see the story out in its own inimitable way that you have to appreciate that level of bloody-mindedness.
Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway (2019) is available now on the Arrow Video Channel.