Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Year of the Everlasting Storm’ on Hulu, a Collection of Covid-Related Shorts by International Auteurs

Hulu now offers The Year of the Everlasting Storm, an ambitious anthology of shorts by seven international filmmakers bent on reminding us how awful the year 2020 was. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lowery, Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Malik Vitthal, Laura Poitras and Dominga Sotomayor don’t just compile their work here for the hell of it – the goal was to create a mosaic of films shot from Covid lockdown, with each director using only nearby locations and the gear on hand. As these projects inevitably go, individual shorts vary widely in content and impact, but maybe in this case, they’ll come together to generate a feeling or statement in a big-picture context.

THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Pigeon eggs are on one side of the window, an iguana on the other. One assumes they’d make a tasty snack, but we’ll eventually learn that this old feller, named Iggy, has no teeth anymore, and has to settle for a syringe full of mashed avocado, which sounds quite delicious to me, thank you very much. His name is Iggy and he’s the pet of Panahi, who films the lizard as he wanders their spacious Tehran apartment, sometimes seeking the solitude of a cut-out space beneath a cupboard fixture. Panahi’s focus shifts with the arrival of his elderly mother, clad in a suit that’s a couple steps shy of Chernobyl ready. She spritzes everything in sight with sanitizer. She doesn’t care for the iguana, but sure seems happy to visit her son and daughter-in-law. This is seemingly a documentary, but sometimes seems too tidy in content and composition to not have a little ecstatic truth in it.

Chen directs a more familiar fiction, which seems like nonfiction, as a couple (Zhou Dongyou and Zhang Yu) makes do in a narrow apartment in Tongzhou, restless and bickering as they try to keep their toddler son fed, occupied, entertained and, surely, protected during lockdown. Vitthal uses animation and facetime/selfie footage to piece together fragments of the plight of real-life Californian Bobby Yay Yay Jones; he’s not separated from his three children by Covid directly, but delayed court dates and other complications keep them in foster homes, and later in a relative’s care, but for him, they’re mostly just in tiny rectangles, their words and faces rendered pixelated and choppy by the limitations of technology. In New York City, Poitras (who won an Oscar for the documentary Snowden) investigates the idea of “digital violence” via an Israeli cyberweapons company that’s using surveillance tech less for Covid tracing and more for nefarious purposes; we see some animated diagrams, lots of expert commentary via Zoom and recurring shots of police and Black Lives Matter protesters seemingly prepping for a clash to occur off-camera.

In Santiago, Sotomayor follows a mother and daughter (Francisca Castillo and Rose Garcia-Huidobro) as they navigate a borderline police state and many rules and ordinances to see their daughter/sister and her brand-new baby; the mother’s only solace appears to be singing out in her greenhouse. Lowery shares the story of a Texas woman (Catherine Machovsky) who lives in her truck and in a sleeveless Evil Dead 2 tee, reading old letters that contain a father’s brokenhearted paeans to his dead son – and a map to an unmarked grave. And finally, in Thailand, Weerasethakul finds the sublime in stillness as he sets up an assemblage of lights above a white-sheeted bed, to draw an assemblage of insects and allow us to meditate on their buzzing, which soon begins to sound like distorted human voices.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Everlasting Storm is like New York Stories or Paris je T’aime, but instead of loving odes to a lovely city, it’s an anti-romantic collection of longing looks out windows and bleary staring at screens.

Performance Worth Watching: Panahi’s mother, Mokarameh Saidi Balsini, leaves a distinct impression: a lovely, emotional, kind, funny, sweetheart of a woman.

Memorable Dialogue: Mokarameh and her granddaughter Solmaz argue about who loves the other more via facetime – although the former takes it seriously and the latter treats it as a joke: “Why don’t you let me die for you instead?” Solmaz says.

Sex and Skin: Just some vague, non-naked nighttime randiness between our Tongzhou couple.

Our Take: As a whole, Everlasting Storm is frequently poetic, but more often aching. Some filmmakers deal with the pandemic and quarantine directly for that immediate I’ve-been-there empathetic impact, while Lowery uses a facemask as an excuse to generate heavy horror-movie breathing on the soundtrack as a flashlight pierces a storage unit like it’s the abandoned starship full of nasty monster eggs in Alien. The direct and indirect approaches both work, and each filmmaker generates a distinctive mood that fits the time and place we were in two years ago, and are kind of stuck in now.

Panahi generates some necessary comedy via his mother, who’s also good for a poignant moment or two. Chen finds a foothold in effective melodrama. Vitthal’s blend of artful animation and artless selfie imagery subtly explores his subject’s pain. Poitras’ presentation is a bit dry, but she creates an eerie atmosphere as she wonders who exactly is watching whom in this new world. Sotomayor ruminates in the dull ache of elongated separation and seeks to find a moment of beauty and connection, both within an increasingly restrictive context. And Weerasethakul – well, the gifted filmmaker of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives makes you wonder how long you’re going to be staring at this bug, and the answer is, long enough for it to feel otherworldly. Everlasting Storm of course can be uneven, but it’s certainly a reminder as to why these filmmakers are all considered auteurs.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Panahi and Weerasethakul’s films are the best here, the former profound in its directness, the latter profound in its strangeness. It’s probably wise to resist taking the wide view on a pandemic that hasn’t ended yet, and we should therefore look at these shorts as nothing more than individual ruminations under the same big umbrella. Everyone here has something vital to say or examine.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream The Year of the Everlasting Storm on Hulu