Residents of Arcadia

Residents of Arcadia contains a beautiful message about immigration and dream pursuing. I love that the overall message of the film is about living ones own life and recognizing that your own life is already the dream. Do not compare yourself to others and focus on yourself.

I also love the portrayal of the lead characters and their relationship. Two immigrants who have to work hard to make ends meet in a new world. Very relatable to my parent's upbringing.

The sci fi component of the film is also very intriguing. I really enjoyed that Dom sprinkled in spurts of comedic moments while tackling a much heavier deep subject.

Residents of Arcadia sustains itself with the idea of willingness. It's a sci-fi that doesn't want to focus on the science fiction, but rather on the human condition behind technological improvements. It's a story of effort, of failure, a contrast of hardship and desire of greatness and self fulfillment. Themes are far more serious and subtle than many sci-fis as the movie doesn't try to answer existensial questions in the dichotomy machine-organic matter, rather why we rely on machines and technology to create the happiness we crave for. Overall a solid movie that gives the viewer more than one interprations after the view.

I don't watch a lot of indie films, but I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of this movie. The themes in this movie were portrayed well and I enjoyed all the twists and turns from sci-fi to drama to even a bit of horror. It reminded me of Black Mirror at times. The casting and acting were great. Some scenes felt somewhat out of place, and at times it felt like more could have been shown instead of explained. Sometimes speech was hard to understand (not because of accents), but this was fine for the most part. The pacing was good, as it hardly felt like an hour and a half. Overall an enjoyable movie and would likely watch again.

I loved the whole theme to this movie. It makes it more interesting when sci-fi meets psychology. It was a better experience going into it cold. The acting was spectacular and it really helped the tension rise throughout the story. However, I do think like in the last review posted, the writing could've shown at least more story than having the characters have a conversation over something that's a key element to the plot. The characters were very relatable and had similar ideologies to what they're objectives are for people in real life and maybe in the future. Overall, this movie was really awesome to watch and I hope to see more films like this in my lifetime. Also, I got to meet the filmmakers of this movie. Shout out to both Dom Cutrupi and Olivier Leroux.