Light Pillar ★★½

Immobility, introversion, and isolation make for a timely, if occasionally exhausting, focus for Xu Zao‘s dreamlike debut feature Light Pillar. Premiering in the Perspectives section of the 76th Berlinale, the melancholy genre hybrid combines animation with live-action sequences into a science-fiction symphony oscillating between tender romance, social critique, and wry humor. The Chinese director, who also penned the screenplay and storyboards, sets his symbolic story in the near future where the alluring accessibility of virtual worlds promises an easy escape from loneliness and social disconnection. In the near future, humanity enjoys routine space travel, but shared cultural memories have begun to fade. 

Lao Zha (Da Peng) works as a solitary janitor at the dilapidated Old New East West Film Studios, a sprawling but bankrupt compound filled with set replicas ranging from the Forbidden City to the Great Sphinx. For decades, he has tended the snow-choked grounds with little more than his cat confidant – a former screen star in its own right – for company. His existence of repetitive labor and muted longing, rendered in quirky hand-drawn animation, is called into question as his boss gives him a VR set as compensation for unreceived pay. Though unfamiliar with the device, Zha manages to try it out and enter a vibrant virtual reality. 

Xu’s use of grainy live-action footage for this cyberspace sphere adds to the idea of a digital illusion more alive than the actual world. Within this virtual space, Zha encounters a spontaneous young woman (Qing Yi) who interrupts his emotional and social stasis. Rather than deploying animation for fairy-tale flights of fancy, Xu uses it to render the protagonist’s everyday existence with a deliberate flatness, underscoring the two-dimensional drabness of his routine. In contrast, the virtual world bursts with sensory detail and muted nostalgia, inviting both Zha and the audience to ponder what “real life” truly means. Zha is instantly captivated by the simulated universe.

There, his new friend introduces him to simple pleasures like eating ice cream in summer and dancing under stars, while imagining a shared future. Though the female player comes dangerously close to the trope of the manic pixie dream girl whose sole narrative purpose is to motivate the male character, the fact that it’s men who seem most at risk of emotional atrophy also serves as a critique of the patriarchal pathology of a nation with a massive gender imbalance (a legacy of the one-child policy). Through their delicate connection, the minimalist plot probes how digital realms can temporarily assuage loneliness while also exposing their inherent fragility. 

The animated depiction of the decaying studio, with its abandoned sets and forgotten icons, evokes a poignant dystopia in which human connection has eroded alongside economic and cultural infrastructures. As a once-vibrant locus of shared imagination now inert, sustained only by a handful of caretakers, this bizarre relic also serves as a metaphor for broader social alienation. Yet for all its visual distinction and thematic ambition, narrative momentum falters. It dwells on repetitive imagery and prolonged sequences, undercutting the emotional arc it seeks to construct. Nevertheless, the nuanced approach to technology as both refuge and illusion offers a rare counterweight to the common extremes of technophobia and digital utopias.