A cinematographic exercise that invites you to experience it without seeking explanations, but simply letting yourself be carried away by its unique visual and narrative proposal. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 6, 2024

This is a wholly original work, and that’s worth more than any notion of success or failure. I’d argue it’s super pleasurable as well, but your mileage may vary; definitely check out Could See a Puma first.

| Jan 12, 2023

William's perspective itself could be enough to stimulate the audience, but his camera and composition add an impressive cinematographic vocabulary to it. [Full Review in Spanish]

| May 23, 2019

The Human Surge was difficult to engage with; the handheld camera work is shaky and unfocused, the POV ventures into naturally (read poorly) lit spaces and Williams completely refuses to construct seamless linear progression...

| Jan 24, 2019

Williams sympathizes with his protagonists, though his film is too fluid and keen on catching the quirkiness of everyday speech and capturing languid moods to act as agitprop.

| Aug 8, 2018

This is post-Costa cinema, slow but chopped to average feature length, puzzling, engrossing, and alienating.

| Apr 26, 2018

In Williams' film, this pulse of energy is everywhere, running through and between all of the subjects: human, animal, material, ambient, and machinic.

| Nov 10, 2017

There are two bravura shots in The Human Surge... Otherwise, well, it's tough going.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 11, 2017

Williams's bewildering, sinuous film encourages us to realise that getting lost is a destination in itself.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 9, 2017

There is something exasperating in the way it withholds the pleasures of film from its audience, allowing long stretches to unfold with no lighting and semi-audible dialogue.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 7, 2017

Starting in Argentina, ranging to Mozambique and the Philippines, The Human Surge picks figures from the blur of the modern world and depicts them in shadowed motion, language an indistinct gesture, too.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 31, 2017

Williams is a gifted director who only has better films in front of him; he appears to be a guy with a concise vision making exactly what he wants to make. Which might be why The Human Surge can't quite connect: Williams only made this for himself.

| Original Score: 6.9/10 | Mar 9, 2017

This conundrum that can be found all over the Internet, to be sure, but rarely with such enigmatic eroticism or breathtaking technique. Like the best nonfiction work of the past few years, it encourages us to look differently at every moving image we see.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2017

It makes for an exhilarating, boldly paradoxical experience-a headlong dive into the rich, knotty, sticky undergrowth amid a proliferation of tidy, well-lit paths.

| Mar 3, 2017

Though the picture is admirable on a conceptual level, its execution is incoherent, interminable and a colossal strain on the eyes.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 3, 2017

Just when you think you've got the movie pegged, it pulls a daring switch of perspective. While the thrill of that little coup is short-lived, it suggests that Mr. Williams may come up with something more substantial with his next feature.

| Mar 2, 2017

A fill-in-the-blanks effort that goes out of its way to repel at every winding turn.

| Mar 1, 2017

It's not so much deliberately confrontational in the way so many experimental films are (or pride themselves on being), but rather risk-taking for the sake of something almost impossible to articulate -- even if based in something obvious.

| Original Score: B | Feb 28, 2017

This is a heckuva stimulating cinematic achievement for a relative newcomer. The Human Surge offers a shrewd commentary on the dissonance of technological connectivity and personal communication.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 28, 2017

Surreal and wordlessly unsettling, Eduardo Williams' globe-crossing feature The Human Surge is intimate and pleasurably inscrutable.

| Feb 28, 2017