Critic Reviews

Drawing on interviews with 10 experts and internet theorists with an endearing mashup of film clips and trippy 3-D animation, A Glitch in the Matrix adapts to the internal logic of its echo chamber until starts to sound pretty convincing on its own terms. If you’re not already one of the diehards convinced we’re living in a simulation, this movie might actually get you there.

Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

Though it leaves some avenues underexplored and gives a bit too much attention to the sci-fi landmark name-checked in its title, the film makes for engrossing, sometimes unsettling viewing.

Fascinating, mind-expanding, infuriating and bewildering, this is a bracingly ambitious documentary which embraces the artificiality of the computer generated animation which constitutes a large part of its approach.

Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.

A Glitch in the Matrix fits well within the canon of Ascher’s pictures, which offer a kind of creepy alternative history of popular culture as interviewees work to identify hidden structures within their lives—including one who insists on organizing time in twelve-day weeks.

Using movie clips, animation and news footage, Ascher creates his own alternate universe in A Glitch in the Matrix and explores phenomena such as the Mandela Effect, a real-life wonder in which masses of unconnected people claim to “remember” something that is simply not true.

A Glitch In The Matrix is a solid sibling to Room 237 and The Nightmare. Once more, Ascher offers an empathetic space to conspiracy theorists and dreamers, creating a superb setting for honesty, earnestness, and vulnerability. Employing keen editing, he illustrates their arguments with pop culture references and panache. However, he also offers the shadow of a doubt, allowing the viewer a safe space to question.

While the doc may be overlong, it’s consistently fascinating because of its implications.

A Glitch in the Matrix is timely and full of mystery and wonder, but lingering on descriptions of surreal subjective experience misses the point. This would be a much more interesting movie if it had more focus on the science of simulation theory.