Users

There are films that take you on a journey beyond words and filmmakers that have mastered a cinematic language so unique it gives the viewer an experience that is both breathtaking and surprising — Natalia Almada’s Users is one of them. The film contemplates from beginning to end, a paradox — the horror of machines and technologies we have created for ourselves and inevitably for our children and the beauty that is produced with their assistance. Such is the camera, such is film — the place where parenting, technology, and the fragility of the human experience intersect. 

Natalia doesn’t offer comfort. Instead, she takes us on a journey of sublime, disquieting beauty into sequences and images that have been crafted as only a painter could have done, she takes us on a journey that is so profoundly cinematic— across data centers that hum like artificial wombs, into forests that breathe, and through a world where the mechanical is no longer a tool but a presence, a companion and a rival.

There is no talking in Users — no experts, no opinions, no polemics. Just time, sound, and image — rendered with such precision they feel almost sacred. I thought often of Tarkovsky, of silence that carries weight. Almada composes her film like a symphony, where the Kronos Quartet’s haunting score pulls us gently — and then with force — into the realization that we are trapped in the wonder and horror that technology has created. The deeply personal footage of her children and her narration combines both an intimacy and a grand cinema that collide into a visual and visceral experience. 

Natalia’s film does not judge. It aches in its beauty. It has a quiet radical power. The world she cinematically crafts is not only alarming, it is beautiful. I found myself addicted to the images just as her young boy stares at the screen in awe, not knowing if to be accepting or horrified by the impact of what he must be seeing, just like us.
 

Danae Elon
Filmmaker