Masking Threshold

Screening of Masking Threshold (2021) on January 21, 2023 (20:00)

Q&A with director/writer Johannes Grenzfurthner after the screening.

Conducting a series of experiments in his makeshift home-lab, a skeptic IT worker tries to cure his harrowing hearing impairment. But where will his research lead him?

Masking Threshold combines a chamber play, a scientific procedural, an unpacking video, and a DIY YouTube channel while suggesting endless vistas of existential pain and decay. Glimpse the world of the nameless protagonist in this eldritch tale, which is by no means for the faint of heart.

"2022 was a stellar year for experimental horror. I’m adding Johannes Grenzfurthner’s brazen and deeply disturbing film to the year’s best formbusters. The narrator is a nameless young gay man whose face we never see. We know little about him, other than he’s a recluse and is tortured by an increasingly debilitating tinnitus-like hearing impairment. As he slowly plummets into paranoia, his dialogue ricochets between meandering rants and sadistic invective. His diminished psychological state is mirrored in the film’s whiplash-inducing cuts — from his feet to audiology textbooks to close-ups of slugs — that almost never stop. It’s no spoiler to say the film ends in shocking stillness."(The New York Times; Top-5 horror films 2022)

Tags: #horror #drama #nerd #lgtb #psychological #arthouse