A TV show based on Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys may be filming later this year without the director’s involvement, but Gilliam himself has something potentially much more interesting on the horizon: The Zero Theorem, a surreal, futuristic piece that debuted yesterday at the Venice Film Festival. Footage of the film has leaked before, but in the lead-up to the premiere, production company Voltage Pictures released the first official look at the film, seen below. An accompanying interview can also be found on the film’s site.
See the gray, ad-drenched future of Terry Gilliam’s ‘The Zero Theorem’ in first official clip
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
The clip calls back heavily to Brazil, with a dystopian street scene that blends gray concrete (and, it appears, ducts) with frenetic advertisements for vacations, self-help products, and the “Church of Batman the Redeemer.” What it doesn’t do is explain much about the film’s core plot, in which futuristic coder Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz of Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained) is tasked with solving an impossible problem for an inhuman bureaucracy. So far, The Zero Theorem itself has received mixed reviews, praised for its whimsical absurdity but criticized for a scattershot directorial vision.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
