Eramus: TFFF Review
Hypothetical scenarios
Welcome back to our coverage of The Final Film Festival “In Competition”.
Today, Joseph Owen submits to the beautiful brainrot of Eramus.
If you missed our “Totally Spies” magazine launch, there will be another chance to pick up a copy on 1st September at The Carousel, where we will be screening The Mole Agent.
Then on 4th September, we are back at The Cinema Museum for the penultimate edition of NOT BY LYNCH: Under The Silver Lake. There might just be a few copies of the issue available there too.
Eramus (Oliver James Hunt, UK, 2026)
Don’t watch this on a hangover. Nor on a Sunday. When your eyes hurt and your face is sad. Amid an unblinking self-annihilating turmoil. In the fierce ennui of early August, which already feels like late August. On the cusp of fucking up, and after you’ve fucked up. During severe motor neurone depletion, your limbs waggling and desiccated, charred from the bottomless sun. At the point you’re happening to draw a perverse semantic parallel between bereavement and loss. Or just as the light in your soul has dimmed to a blackened murmur, because the scope and nature of your existence is merely rumoured, a faintly recorded outline of who you thought you were and who you might be. In any of these hypothetical scenarios, don’t bother. Your constitution won’t handle it.
Lucky, then, that I was in such gay, ample spirits while settling in for Eramus (2026), a kaleidoscopic video essay-fiction mishmash from Oliver James Hunt, showing in competition at the Final Film Festival in London. The film inhabits the experiential world of a nameless young woman whose boyfriend disappears, a world mediated almost entirely online and through her smartphone, a disaggregated lingua franca of earnest diarising, message chains, Google maps, and streams of uncanny video content. This visual vernacular is articulated solely through intertitles, with no dialogue or spoken narration. This approach handily evokes the atomised, internalised character of the secular consumer in modern societies, of which the narrator is emblematic, and in which we are all basically implicated. That’s why it hits; that’s why you need to watch it with your big boots on.
You’re also made to feel a bit sick. A punishing blitz of strobe-lighting introduces a series of deer shown in perturbing night-vision, revealing their cervine eyeballs, globular and possessed. They stand eerily on hind legs, pockmarked with navel-gazing questions about algorithms, simulations, and late-night/early-morning doomscrolling. Our heroine is “obsessed” because they are “beautiful to watch.” Elsewhere, a stilted avatar—an animated white man with brown hair, no less—appears intermittently to proselytise the benefits of psychic therapy, interspersed with stills of Reddit threads, 4chan posts, and corpulent Hentai cartoons. These constitute the film’s wryer moments, where the internet appears chiefly to be an ironic project, despondent, inward, and grimly esoteric.
Yet gaudy cyberspace is juxtaposed next to wonders of web discovery. We’re presented The Lovers of Teruel, a sculpture depicting the tragic tale of doomed paramours in 13th-century Spain. We follow the Google search, the AI overview, the Instagram post, the still image, the painted renderings, the tour guide analysis, the iterated story across different texts, and a photograph of prostrate skeletons, approximating their star-cross’d plight. “A strange pain washed over me,” claims the intertitle, and the sincerity of this section suggests more potently than most appraisals the jarring embodiment of being online, and therefore of being.
This heartfelt inquiry into the self intensifies a wider cosmological, even Kabbalistic, thesis. “In the beginning. There was nothing. Until there was… something.” The film’s opening moments snare the viewer in its mysterious treatise on interconnectedness, underscored by a barrage of buzzes, hisses, and static that resembles the visceral madeleine of dial-up landlines. These sounds, appropriately, are that of an alien jurisdiction. Echoes of this synth-like drone suffocate the chaptered episodes, where Hunt cross-stitches his sonic and graphic interpretation of how we journey through the netherworld of now, and how that journey is embroiled in what we used to be. Eramus, in Latin, means we were. Past and present have been always entwined, this arresting work suggests, but this entwinement is today charged with a unique pain and beauty. Joseph Owen