First Person Plural – first-look review

A bourgeois couple experience the noxious effects of a vaccine in this gorgeous, surreal study of corrupted minds and bodies.

The opening shot of Sandro Aguilar’s beguiling, challenging third feature, First Person Plural, sees a suited man wearing an eyeless white ski-mask as he delicately pens a note to his spouse. He contorts his arms, hands, and fingers as if he’s conducting an orchestra, pointing with a mannered effeteness at domestic objects, feeling them from a remote distance. He glides through the space, hyper-conscious of everything around him.

When he finally prowls upstairs to deliver the note, we meet his wife laying in bed, and the pair’s oblique repartee suggests that the vibe in this household is very much off. Yet it’s never clearly stated whether this is a stylised directorial tic – to have actors’ body movements and enunciations choreographed like they’re playing in a Jacques Tati movie – or whether something has happened to provoke this entertainingly strange state of being.

Aguilar refuses to spoon-feed any kind of overt context, so the viewer is left to decipher the dialogue for clues as to what’s happening – and it’s not an easy task. What’s more, the other characters in the film, the pair’s errant, mysterious son, and two of the father’s acquaintances, seem also to be lightly afflicted with whatever this couple have wrong with them, but perhaps not to the same balletic, body-twitching extent.

I will admit: while watching the First Person Plural, I was not able to discern any kind of cause or effect for what was happening on screen, and had to lean on a description in the festival catalogue to gain some light comprehension. Apparently, the couple have planned a break on a tropical island and have both had to take vaccines prior to the trip, and their otherworldly behaviour is a symptom. It’s definitely there in the dialogue, but it’s a blink and you’ll miss it type thing.

And yet, not knowing this key plot detail did not dim the pleasures of this expressive and unique film, and Aguilar weaves movements and scenes into a dream-like tapestry, stitched together with evocative, late night hotel bar piano music and sultry, slow cross-fades. It’s the ambient atmospherics that lock you into the story, even if there’s little obvious logic to character motivation. Life outside of this leafy enclave is alluded to but never explained, and so you’re left to merely allow each gorgeously-conceived scene to melt into the next.

Special mention must go to Rui Xavier’s cinematography which manages to feel but exacting and completely loose, framed and blocked to perfection, but also open to the actors’ random flights of fancy. The production design, too, of the family house help to foment this notion of a dimly-lit bourgeois netherworld that’s a little like a prison you don’t want to escape from.

Yet maybe this is best taken as a “trip” movie, in which Aguilar explores the intersections between the acting process and the noxious effects of drugs; in both cases an outside force consumes our bodies and has its wicked way with us. And like many psychedelic drugs, there are repellant qualities to this film, and many will likely want the trip to end before it has properly begun.

Published 2 Feb 2025

Tags: International Film Festival Rotterdam Jacques Tati Portuguese Cinema Tiger Competition