Aotearoa was treated to a mighty helping of homegrown cinema last year. Among the wealth of period pieces, hefty dramas, and insightful docos, there was one film that was… a little harder to categorise.
Gut Instinct is a faux public service announcement of sorts where you, the viewer, are learning how your body became colonised by microbe aliens and why you’re in a concentration camp with the other survivors of a near extinction level event. Marked as “an audiovisual purification programme,” the feature compiles free-to-use archival footage with hypnotic visuals and scratchy 2D animation all threaded together with a suspiciously jovial but authoritative narrator.
Making its debut at last year’s Terror-Fi Film Festival, director Doug Dillaman took the film across the motu for numerous interactive screenings. Writing for The Post, James Croot called it “a mix of fabulous world-building, arresting visuals and black humour.” Alex Casey, writing for The Spinoff’s Rec Room, added it was “truly unlike anything I’ve seen in a cinema before.”
Last month, Dillaman premiered Gut Instinct internationally with two screenings in the US. It was enough to generate the best/worst Letterboxd review any filmmaker could want from a punter who took an edible to “enhance” the experience only to suffer a full-blown anxiety attack partway through the film.
If you’d rather have that experience in the comfort of your own home, you can rent it exclusively via New Zealand streaming service AroVision. For Aucklanders wanting the full experience, you can catch an encore screening at Beachside Cinema Takapuna on 15 September at 6pm. And if you’d rather an ears-only experience, An Aural Purification Enhancement is available on Bandcamp.
