29gram (2017)

Aesthetic Without Pulse

This one had all the right ingredients. The premise was sharp — social media as performance, identity as branding, connection filtered through curated feeds. I wanted it to cut deep. I wanted it to say something uncomfortable and honest about the way we shape ourselves for the scroll. And for a second, it felt like it might.

But 29gram never quite got there.

It danced around big ideas — digital loneliness, the pressure to perform happiness, the blur between online envy and offline emptiness — but instead of digging in, it skimmed. The characters felt more like avatars than people, each representing something rather than embodying it. I kept waiting for one of them to break out of the mold, to say or do something that cracked the surface. But no one did.

The performances weren’t bad, just oddly hollow. Every emotional beat felt like it had quotation marks around it — “this is jealousy,” “this is despair,” “this is a breakdown” — and that lack of texture made it hard to connect. Even the moments that clearly wanted to land with weight pulled back too quickly or collapsed under awkward dialogue.

There were hints of something real underneath — scenes where a glance or hesitation suggested more than the script allowed. But those flashes never had the space to breathe. It kept shifting tones, unsure if it wanted to be a critique, a tragedy, or just a stylized mood piece. And in trying to be all three, it didn’t land as any.

I didn’t hate it. But I didn’t feel much at all.

By the end, I wasn’t frustrated — just numb. Like I’d been shown a gallery of glossy images without the stories behind them. Maybe that was the point. But if it was, it didn’t trust me enough to feel it without being told. It had the look, but not the weight.

Whatever it meant to be, it didn’t arrive.

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