Early last year, a theory started doing the rounds: if comic-book movies have lost their sheen, might video-game adaptations take their place? Two of the biggest and most widely discussed entertainments at the time, The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Last of Us, began their lives on consoles. One was ostensibly about gaming; the other had things to say about the human condition. Better, I would wager, on both counts is Knit’s Island, a micro-budget film that premiered at Visions du Real in Switzerland around the same time and screened once more at the Luxembourg City Film Festival earlier this year, where I caught it again and found it just as delightful. When it isn’t having fun, it’s a film that reaches for something cosmic. It takes place almost entirely in the world of DayZ, a survival RPG released in 2018. For the film’s production, documentarians Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, and Quentin L’Helgouach spent a mighty 936 hours on the platform––a far-from-unusual number for even the game’s casual players, and of course far less than ardent enthusiasts they encounter.
Crucially, it never feels like a gimmick. Knit’s Island isn’t the first documentary to try something like this. One of the best I’ve seen was Hardly Working, a short by the Austrian collective Total Refusal that premiered in Locarno in 2022 and offered a brief, Marxist dissertation on the labor of NPCs in Red Dead Redemption 2. As a feature, Knit’s has a much larger scope but is set apart by other things. Most significantly, the filmmakers approach it like a real documentary, with Barbier, Causse, and L’Helgouach appearing in the game as a film crew––their avatars even wear PRESS badges across their chests à la war reporters. In game, one of them directs and conducts the interviews, another sets up the shots (mostly POV, with occasional 3rd-person flourishes and aerial shots), and the other acts as a kind of fixer. The latter is mainly tasked with keeping other players out-of-shot and, more importantly, from killing them, as well as fighting off the occasional zombie: in one sequence, an interview is put on hold so he can see to one with a large shovel.
There is a sense of humility to this approach that can feel Herzogian at times. More than anything, Knit’s Island is a work of genuine curiosity, and that vibe is as endearing for the viewer as it is effective in getting their subjects to open up––by matching the players’ sincerity, they quickly gain their trust. Despite wandering for days on the game’s expansive map without finding a soul, many players they do find have richly developed characters. The world of DayZ is post-apocalyptic in the standardized blueprint of The Last of Us and The Road (it’s set in the fictional post-Soviet republic of Chernarus following a zombie outbreak), but despite the heroes of those stories often being a real or ersatz father and child, the most interesting players in Knit’s seem drawn to more sinister archetypes. In one sequence, the team are led by online rumors to a heavily guarded house where they land an interview with a femdom gang leader who enslaves male players as a form of initiation.
Beyond all that good stuff, Barbier, Causse, and L’Helgouach find ethereal wonders in the game’s design. At one point, they’re taken to a point on the map where a glitch allows players to see into the un-rendered world below––a location their guides treat as sacred, like an ayahuasca trip. Later on, they join a race to the world’s periphery with a group of players who wonder, à la Truman, what it would be like to travel out and touch the horizon. It’s a wonderfully inquisitive film, as searching as it is sincere.
Knit’s Island premieres at Metrograph at Home on Friday, September 6.
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