Michael Overton Brown — Metastasis
Reviewed by Lauren Levato Coyne

It would be hard to not draw a line between the fractured, overlapping, on-the-move cityscape of Michael Overton-Brown’s Metastasis and the feature-length films Inception or Dr. Strange. This is the down side to working in a medium and with imagery that is ruled by directors like Christopher Nolan and the all-consuming Marvel Cinematic Universe, titans whose collective cultural footprints are so pervasive they are hard to escape. But maybe that’s the point.

Overton-Brown begins the film with a close-up on trees and pay phones. At their height in the 1990s, America had 2.6 billion public pay phones. By 2020, only about 100,000 remained (it’s unknown how many of these actually still function). This statistic alone indicates a lot about community, class, and progress, about growth but also decline and decay. As the film continues it pulls back in a steady revelation. Phone booths give way to landscapes of satellite dishes and generic, grey institutional buildings that look like early versions of calculators or computers. Advertisements litter collapsed infrastructures, houses pass by, things continue to overlap and pile up unchecked, moored only by each other in a continual assemblage of human detritus with occasional strips of green, like trees used as boundary markers for roadways.

The film’s title, Metastasis, is the medical term for cancer’s uncontrolled growth beyond its original mass. It’s also a very literal statement about our current Anthropo-predicament, a statement that is hard to argue with.