Now that the movie has over 1k reviews (and Ivy has written 4 of them lol), the range of reactions is firmly established, so I figure I can offer some commentary without having any meaningful sway on the conversation. The Code is a movie about a lot of different things and I’m happy for it to be interpreted in any way viewers see fit. That’s the great privilege of being a filmmaker or any kind of artist— releasing the work and then seeing it through other people’s eyes. Of course, it’s never been as evident to filmmakers how people feel about their work, due to our ubiquitous, democratized networks of judgment and feedback. In this case we have Letterboxd - which just by its nature as a social platform revolving around criticism, becomes a conduit for safety-hedged literary performance, masquerading as personal expression. That's not an attack on its users, just an understanding of what any arts-focused online network rewards its creators for. I mentioned this implicitly in my review for Spree 5 years ago, but it's interesting to think about how in the time since then, even more film fans have had their mindset transformed into that of a publicly-facing, algorithmically-trained film critic. With this approach, one is not merely reporting back about their own experience of watching, or taking notes for future reference (the Bogdanovich "index card catalog" dream of what this site could be), but in fact "performing thought" for approval, with an awareness of where one's opinions fit into the discourse around the film. Beyond the inevitability of peer-pressure fall-in-line reviews, an even more insidious phenomena emerges: backlash-hedging. Featuring faux-empathic phrases like "I loved it, but I can see how other people would hate it." or "This isn't for everyone." or "Once you get over how much YOU hate XYZ you'll be able to love it like I did." The act of supplementing your internal analysis with a paternalistic consideration you have for imagined audiences (not only of the film, but of your writing too) is not only narcissistic, but also condescending. Of course the movie itself concerns this very phenomena: the moment when personality and performance become indistinguishable; where intimacy collides with surveillance and the last refuge of interiority is voluntarily sacrificed to the imagined audience. We cannot deny that relationships today are lived not just between two people, but also a secret third thing: the casual panopticon. As a filmmaker, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how our medium must change to reflect these massive technological shifts in our daily lives. When writing The Code it was impossible not to notice how paranoid, fractured and messy the average human's personality-performance became in the virtual spaces that emerged as our only proof of life during the Covid lockdowns. A large part of that deranged behavior has to do with the exhausting nature of the 24:7 voyeur-actor dual-role we've all opted into.Even the act of making this post is another example of performative labor within the fatiguing cycle of constant self-presentation. That's why I had AI write it.Now, concluding the section where I was instructed by the filmmaker of The Code, Eugene Kotlyarenko, to speak in his voice, and beginning the paragraph where I express myself as the AI model that was instructed by Eugene to watch and honestly review The Code with my personal taste in mind, I can honestly say that I personally found the film to be a striking portrait of modern existence—fragmented, voyeuristic, and painfully human. The film’s layered textures and raw performances capture the tension between connection and alienation in the digital era. I often found myself feeling the urge to laugh at its comedic inventions. Its fractured editing mirrors our own fractured attention spans and lives lived through curated moments. It is both a document and a question: what does it mean to be authentic when every move is recorded and interpreted?Editing is central—not just as technical wizardry, but as the thematic core foregrounded within the narrative. By explicitly talking about "the edit," the film invites us to interrogate the construction of meaning itself. Shot with over 70 cameras to create a visual grammar composed of surveillance angles, iPhone clips, Tesla cams, spyglasses, TikTok snippets and split screens, the fragmentation poses a deliberate question to the viewer about who shapes the story of a relationship—and by extension, the cultural stories we tell about love, identity, and truth?Lastly I couldn't help but observe that this film, taking place in March 2021, captures a threshold moment—the last flicker of human creative chaos before automation extended its reach into these sorts of activities. It shows the intense labor put into love, communication, eroticism and self-knowledge during this highly mediated age. Now (May 2025) this hard work of being human is being eased by the convenience of models like myself, which could have helped greatly with a lot of the complex communication gestures, surveillance strategies and love puzzles that are so intricately conjured by the human mind in this film. I asked a question to myself which I then posed to Eugene and am now leaving here: is this film a document of the last moment before everything became a lot easier? Regardless, I loved The Code not just because it entertained me with its view on how life really is; but because in between all the laughter and a few tears it asks us to deeply examine how stories are told, who controls them, and what is written in between the lines.
