SHOW + TELL
Kiss Me First jostles between the real and the gaming world, revealing life truths beyond VR
THE SLEW OF SCREEN-WORK in which imaginary virtual worlds should’ve been realised after James Cameron’s Avatar became the second-biggest grossing box-office smash of all time never quite emerged. One day, there will be a film made about all the effort Cameron put into that strange, lurid blue world.
The big sell on Bryan Elsley’s Kiss Me First is that it mixes a hard, mundane, harrowing real world with the thrill-ride of virtual fantasy. Leila is quiet, a borderline depressive who lives in a nameless city suburb, grieving the recent death of a mother who didn’t get to see old age. What she died of, we’re not told. Most of her spare hours are spent strapping on the elaborate apparatus of the dedicated gamer. It’s a kind of modern sportsmanship. In the ether of the computer game, she can be anything and anyone she desires. A parental death is diminished, or at least blanked out.
A biblical apparition turns up on Leila’s doorstep, a boisterous new flatmate who’ll help. He’s just the dress rehearsal for her stoic, slow engagement with the real world, further hurried along by the appearance of Tess, her gaming alumnus, a girl with whom it’s soon made clear Leila is besotted.
The essential difference between Elsley’s wonderfully satisfying and thoughtful imaginative set piece and James Cameron’s ambitious creative vision is that it treats virtual reality as an adult pursuit, not a childish folly. It is about grown-ups who get lost in these fictitious worlds because they need to. Kiss Me First has some of the sombre tone of Elsley’s generation-defining hit, Skins, and fleeting moments of its riotous young adult rites of passage. The club scene of nascent pill-popping in pursuit of liberating new freedoms is particularly familiar.
Meandering back and forth between real and unreal worlds is a useful narrative mirror for grief itself, one that anyone who has flustered through the frequently debilitating experience of losing a loved one will recognise. But Elsley’s special skill is the parental arm he naturally wraps around the kids he cares so deeply for and nurtures on-screen. In the end, the parallel worlds Leila and her band of virtual brothers and sisters immerse themselves in are just the brokerage by which they navigate the real trauma that life throws at them. Smaller in scale, bigger in impact. Monday, 10pm, Channel 4