Sundance Film Festival movie review: 'The Pink Cloud'

(Image courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)

A deadly worldwide crisis forces everyone to take shelter in their homes, requiring them to quarantine in the drama 'The Pink Cloud' (world premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival).

In short: After a toxic pink cloud mysteriously appears across the world, Giovana (Renata de Lélis) finds herself stuck in a flat with a man she just met, changing her life in a way she never expected.

The parallels between 'Pink Cloud' and the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic are impossible to ignore - to the point that this eerily timely drama actually has an upfront disclaimer stating that this story was written and filmed before the coronavirus pandemic began. If this film was released just a year earlier, 'The Pink Cloud' would have just seemed like an intriguing hypothetical.

But it's truly disturbing just how prophetic this film is. Frankly it's unsettling. The film has virtually no plot to speak of - Giovana brings a guy to her place, and everyone is forced indoors the very next morning. So much of 'The Pink Cloud' is experiential - the creeping emotional toll of prolonged isolation and deepening hopelessness. But all these conventions, as weirdly familiar as they may seem now, track how increasingly isolated people cope as they endure a seemingly endless lockdown.

Anyone living through 2020 knows that time stops "being a thing" as days start to bleed together - and 'The Pink Cloud' also plays fast and loose with time. This effectively impresses the grueling passage of days that bleed into weeks and months. 'Pink Cloud' becomes all the more harrowing as time passes - but it also becomes more distant and the film hard to relate to (yes, even given real-world circumstances).

While the film primarily focuses on Giovana's emotional arc, the film surrounds her with supporting characters who seemingly exist only to represent all the other terrible ways isolation can inflict emotional and psychological harm. They're simply avatars who represent alternative situations counter to Giovana's unexpected quarantine with Yagos, a man she barely knows. She has a single friend whose lonely life gradually dims her world view. She has a young family member who happened to be with a friends family. And Yagos has a father losing a slow battle with dementia. But these characters have almost no depth or real effect on the main story - except to reveal other ways the cloud has radically changed lives, mostly for the worse.

Final verdict: Perhaps it is unfair to this prescient film, however, it is nearly impossible to divorce this movie's themes from real-world events. 'The Pink Cloud' has a completely unintended weight to it due to how morbidly it mirrors the pandemic's emotional turmoil.

Score: 3.5/5

'The Pink Cloud' screens at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. This sci-fi drama is not yet rated and has a running time of 105 minutes.