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'The Congress' has a transcendent spookiness

( Unrated ) ( Monitor Movie Guide )

'The Congress' stars Robin Wright as an actress who enters into a pact with a studio overseer (Danny Huston) to trade her career in exchange for a digitized immortality.

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Drafthouse Films/AP
Robin Wright (playing a version of herself) projecting happiness within the machine scanning her likeness in 'The Congress.'
  • By Peter Rainer Film critic

“The Congress,” a partially animated fantasia directed by Ari Folman and very loosely based on a science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, has a not altogether implausible premise. In the future, movies will be enacted by lifelike holograms. Not only will we revere these new-style “scanned” movie stars; we will be able to ingest them like a fruit drink. Movie stars will become a substance, a formula. (Isn’t this already happening?)

The star in question, Robin Wright, gamely playing a version of herself, enters into a pact with a studio overseer (Danny Huston) to trade forever her career in exchange for a digitized immortality. Folman, who made the great “Waltzing With Bashir,” doesn’t satisfyingly unify the live action and animation (by Yoni Goodman), but the film has a transcendent spookiness anyway. Grade: B+ (This film has not yet been rated.)

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