An ADHD Experience With Tilda Swinton and Audio Adventure in the Dark: London Fest Gets Immersive

The game starts off in quite a simple fashion. You are asked to “hoover up” some of the virtual space around you by pressing a controller in your left hand, turn it into an object, such as a strawberry, pineapple or skull, with your right hand controller, and shoot it at a matching item in the virtual space. That feels easy enough in stage one, called “excite.” But it gets harder, faster and more intense as you move on to the stages of “stress,” “overwhelm” and eventually impossible when you reach the stage appropriately called “panic.” “OK, thought experiment over! Some games are impossible to win,” I hear Tilda Swinton ‘s voice telling me. “I’d be lying if I said you had a chance there. Some systems are rigged.” And then she asks me how much control I think I really have.

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Welcome to the world of Impulse: Playing With Reality , narrated by the British star and informed by more than 100 hours of interviews, that explores Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and provides insight into what it, and neurodiversity in general, means.

Experiencing the installation involves putting on a virtual reality headset and diving into what ADHD is really like. The game is followed by stories shared by real people about their struggles, along with takeaway lines that help illustrate them.

The second installment in the “Playing With Reality” series from U.K. studio Anagram, which aims to shed light on mental health conditions through immersive storytelling, was co-produced by Floréal & France Télévisions and co-directed by May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy. After premiering at the 2024 Venice Immersive program of the 81st Venice International Film Festival , it is currently being presented as part of the 68th BFI London Film Festival ‘s Expanded lineup.

Swinton also narrated the first installment, Goliath , an exploration of one man’s experience of schizophrenia, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best VR Immersive Work at the Venice festival in 2021 and earned an Emmy nomination in the outstanding interactive media innovation category. Meta recently acquired Impulse for its Meta Quest service after also releasing Goliath .

Impulse is one of five immersive installations in this year’s LFF program, with the others including Last Minute , described as “one moment in time, stretched to infinity,” The Great Endeavor , billed as a cinematic experience envisioning a future of “planetary transformation,” and Superradiance: Embodying Earth , which promises a virtual simulation “exploring the interplay of AI and dance.”

The final immersive offering is called Arcade and comes courtesy of Darkfield, set in one of the company’s trademark shipping containers. A synopsis of its story asks: “Can a gaming avatar be conscious of its own actions?”

When you enter the container set up at the BFI Southbank Centre in London, you drop off your bag, stand in front of an arcade-style gaming station with the words “I Am Milk” written on top of it, and get a brief introduction and a final chance to leave — before entering total darkness. What follows is a 25-minute, choose-your-own-path audio adventure set in a war-torn world that combines spatial sound and sensory effects with a 1980s video game aesthetic.

The concept sounds simple. You inhabit the body of an avatar. Whenever she encounters people, they ask questions, and you respond “yes” by pressing a button or “no” if you don’t press it. The avatar then voices that answer, and the story unfolds based on the answer.

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On the LFF’s website, audiences get warned that the experience from artistic directors David Rosenberg and Glen Neath contains “themes of violence to humans, including children, and animals, death, warfare, explicit language, sexual content.”

Neath and Rosenberg smiled when told how intense the experience in the container felt, mentioning that you could replay it many times with different outcomes. “It changes. There are about 35 to 50 endings,” Neath tells The Hollywood Reporter . “There are 35 very distinct endings, and about 50 or so different endings. So everybody will have a very, very different way and a very different story.”

The creators call Arcade a “show,” and there’s a reason for that. “We both come from the theater, but usually with an interest in the audience, as opposed to just traditional plays,” explained Neath. “So all of our shows have been about the positioning of the audience within the story. This particular set of tools that we use for all our shows — the complete darkness and 3D binaural sound — are a means of whispering at every audience member at the same time, if you like. So it always feels as if the story is particular to you, and you’re in some way involved in the story.”

In addition to the major installations, the 2024 LFF Expanded program also includes a chance to play five free video games at the BFI Imax in Waterloo, the first time games are being showcased at the festival.

The games include Closer the Distance , a simulation game that explores what happens to a local community after a tragedy hits its idyllic setting; Dome-King Cabbage , promoted as “a mind-expanding trip through space and time”; Scottish Highlands adventure A Highland Song , Paper Trail , a puzzle-adventure set in a foldable paper world; and Playing Kafka , which, in this year of the 100th anniversary of the famous author’s death in 1924, allows players to explore stories inspired by three novels by Kafka — namely The Trial , The Castle and Letter to the Father — in “a gaming experience that places you at the heart of its story.”

The Kafka game sees you play protagonists straight out of some of his most famous stories featuring characters who feel isolated and must face baffling bureaucratic powers and bizarre, surrealistic predicaments. For example, in The Trial , you are accused of an unexplained transgression and must try and navigate through a world in which you can’t trust anyone. “Have fun and try not to die,” one of the nice festival team members told me when she handed me the tablet on which the game is played. Ten minutes later, I failed to survive for the first time, but was curious to try restarting and trying a different path through the story.

“I’m excited that we have added video games in the free gaming lounge into the mix this year as part of our expanded program,” Kristy Matheson recently told THR about this year’s London festival, her second as the BFI fest’s director. “That feels really exciting because I like this idea that for people who love screen-based work, they don’t really care if it’s a movie or a game as long as they are interested in storytelling. So it’s nice for us to be able to expand and crack open the door a little wider to some new audiences.”

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