Psychosis

Psychosis is a visceral, experimental short that weaponizes Moscow's cityscape into a disorienting plunge into mental collapse. Bathed in a corrosive blue filter and intercut with feverish sketches from Pablo Picasso's early work, this hallucinatory journey rejects narrative to simulate the sensory chaos of a psychotic break. Through jarring visuals, aggressive sound design, and symbolic juxtapositions, Sergey A. Crafts a suffocating ode to urban alienation and the fragility of perception.

The Blue Filter - Depressive Reality. The monochromatic cyan saturation drains Moscow of vitality, transforming streets, skies, and architecture into a frozen, alien world. This hue-associated with coldness, melancholy, and digital decay-mirrors the emotional numbness of dissociation. The Kremlin's domes and Stalinist towers become spectral relics, stripped of grandeur.

Insertions of Picasso's early "Blue Period" studies act as visual seizures. Their raw, unfinished lines clash with Moscow's rigid geometry, symbolizing the mind's struggle to reconcile internal turmoil with external reality. A sketch of a weeping woman overlays a metro station-collapsing past suffering into present desolation.

Shots of the UNESCO World Heritage site, filmed through grimy train windows, render its golden domes as fleeting, warped mirages. The motion blur and reflections shatter its sanctity, critiquing how history and spirituality dissolve in the velocity of modern life. This is Moscow as a soul in transit: unmoored, unstable, forever passing through moments of grace it cannot grasp.

A prolonged, static shot of a duck floating in a murky pond becomes the film's most unnerving sequence. Its unnatural stillness (enhanced by the blue filter) morphs the creature into a grotesque rubber toy-a Lynchian absurdity. This symbolizes psychosis' cruel paradox: the mind latches onto mundane details, distorting them into obsessive focal points while the world unravels.

Piercing industrial noise-screeching metal, distorted sirens, sub-bass drones-replicates auditory hallucinations. The lack of rhythm or melody mirrors the disorganized thinking of psychosis, where sound becomes physical assault. When paired with Picasso's sketches, it evokes the "scream" the artist sought to capture: raw, wordless anguish. Brief respites in sound amplify the dread, making the duck's sequence feel like a suffocating pause before sensory relapse.

The city embodies a mind under siege. Its landmarks represent cognitive pillars-faith, power, memory-crumbling under the blue filter's depressive haze. The duck symbolizes fixation, the train windows dissociation, and Picasso's art intrusive thoughts.

Sergey A. Uses the artist's pre-Cubist work deliberately. These sketches-obsessed with poverty, isolation, and distorted bodies-mirror psychosis' deconstruction of identity. A fragmented face screams: "You are not whole here." Beyond depression, the hue evokes digital glitches and surveillance. In a city where history is politicized and privacy eroded, "Psychosis" suggests that Moscow's soul is not crumbling-it's being algorithmically erased.

"Psychosis" distills the director's signature rebellion. Shot on consumer gear, its rawness echoes but trades found-footage literalism for poetic abstraction. The duck's eternal close-up mirrors "Silent Room"'s (2023) static emptiness, compressing eternity into four minutes.

"Psychosis" is Sergey A.'s most potent sensory weapon since "City of Devil" (2020). It offers no solace, only confrontation: with Moscow's ghosts, with Picasso's screams, with the duck in your own mind. Fans of David Lynch's "Eraserhead" or Gasper Noé's "Enter the Void" will recognize its genius. In just 240 seconds, Sergey A. Proves that true horror isn't supernatural-it's the city outside your window, warping into a funhouse mirror of despair.