The Human Surge (Spanish: El auge del humano) is a 2016 experimental film directed, written, shot and edited by the Argentine director Eduardo Williams.
Williams has stated that he wanted to explore the sensation and feelings related to aimlessness and travel, and thereby "create a rhythm between excitement and boredom or surprise and depression.
Critical comparisons were made with other filmmakers working in the slow cinema subgenre, which emphasises the durational aspect of the moving image, rather than its narrative qualities.
A later scene shows a character urinating on an anthill, which functions as a diegetic segue to the film's third segment, when the camera burrows into the earth, following an ant until it arrives at a hand holding a smartphone in a jungle somewhere in the Philippines.
I forgot!, 2014), he and his usual cinematographers Joaquin Neira and Julien Guillery experimented with various aesthetic strategies—notably the use of long, handheld tracking shots (often described as "floating" and "restless"[7][8]), amateur photography, as well as elliptical storytelling—which they also used in The Human Surge.
[5] The film has been analysed for its commonalities with other entries in Williams' oeuvre, most notably the themes of alienation in the internet age, and how modern technology creates distance between people.
He considered the transition into the anthill to be reminiscent of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where in the opening scene the camera similarly dives "beneath the manicured lawn".
[8] Ambulatory passages are frequent in Williams' cinema, where (often young) characters are seen moving through dilapidated apartments, supermarkets, areas of urban decay, jungles, rocky hillsides and caves.
[11] In the final segment, Williams wanted to address the "illusion of escape", by moving to the natural, verdant greens of the Filipino jungle, only to pull back into a machine-filled factory, which he found to be a "very strange" and "very digital place".
[13] When the movie was shown at the Maryland Film Festival, programmer Eric Allen Hatch invoked the genre called slow cinema, citing filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Lisandro Alonso, Harmony Korine and Gus van Sant, who also use the camera to depict the passing of time through the frame.
It won the main prize in the section "Filmmakers of the Present" at the festival, the jury of which included Italian giallo director Dario Argento.
[7][8][15] "No film of the 2010s came closer to the texture of contemporary lived experience than Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge, which captures a mode of apprehending, moving through, and relating to the world—ambivalently connected, hyperalert yet distractible—that is absolutely of the moment.
He was also impressed by the "bucolic natural beauty" of the film, finding the experience of watching it to be "a headlong dive into the rich, knotty, sticky undergrowth amid a proliferation of tidy, well-lit paths".