Masking Threshold
In the basement of a rented house in Apopka, Florida, a man hides from his neighbours, the calls from his work from which he has been absent, from his mother, from the outside world and its demands and distractions and most of all its noise, converting the room into a laboratory in which he will conduct meticulous research into the misunderstood and misdiagnosed ailment which has plagued since September 16th, 2019, three years previously.
Akin to tinnitus but more pernicious, the precise symptoms and unceasing persistence of the auditory disturbance indicating it is not something so easily categorised and dismissed, through research, hypothesis and experimentation he is determined to isolate the cause and then cure the tormenting malady which caused him to abandon his PhD and destroyed his personal life.
Premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2021, Masking Threshold is directed by the artist and theatrical performer Johannes Grenzfurthner from a script co-written with Samantha Lienhard, forming the first part of a loose trilogy along with his later films Razzennest and Solvent, an abstract headfirst tumble into a consuming vortex of a battle against the “professional ineptitude” of the medical establishment and the recalcitrance of both matter and microorganisms to provide answers.
Comparable to Todd Haynes’ Safe where a housewife becomes increasingly sick in the ordinary environment of her life or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi where a mathematician seeking to understand the nature of the universe is plagued by debilitating headaches, Masking Threshold is an angry film, becoming an echo chamber of outrage and insanity in its comprehensive accusations of the failures of healthcare, religion and pseudoscience even as it descends into that same quagmire.
With Grenzfurthner playing the physical embodiment of the protagonist, never directly named but identified in correspondence as P T Alcorn, the increasingly obsessive voiceover is provided by Ethan Haslam as he considers the possibilities of a traumatic triggering event, overexcited nerve cells and the external influences of other lifeforms, algae, fungi, lichen, ants, slugs, his compulsive consumption of knowledge escalating as did Renfield’s “zoophagous mania.”
An uncomfortably intimate film, often filmed in extreme close-up of objects which dominate the frame, documents and data, the mad pursuit of the sound of death to unlock the secrets of life, the techniques of ASMR as torture, while on the surface Masking Threshold presents the unravelling of a “hypochondriac weirdo seeking secular salvation” it is not without substance, aware that multicellular life is a statistical oddity, that the cosmos creating an organism capable of questioning its own creation and purpose is in itself a terrifying aberration.
Masking Threshold will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Friday 26th September
