With good reason, the subtitle of this film is A Meta Detective Story, a story focusing on the quest to understand the unknowable – a film about the puzzles of life, brought together in a virtuoso Borgesian thought experiment. At the centre of this narrative labyrinth is a reclusive woman who searches for meaning in the mysterious documents that keep appearing to her. In all these documents, people are hidden and they all try to understand the world. Her apartment changes into an archive, and she is the archivist. Knowledge is a thought trap, is what the archivist discovers. People look for an explanation but conclusions cannot be drawn – passwords and keys get lost. The importance of a thought experiment is that you can think about it, according to the novice Cockburn, who had previously made a name for himself as maker of short films and as a video artist. He plays a lightfooted game with high stakes: the essence of life itself.
