The Human Surge (El auge del humano) [Audio: Spanish]

Though the picture is admirable on a conceptual level, its execution is incoherent, interminable and a colossal strain on the eyes.

Just when you think you've got the movie pegged, it pulls a daring switch of perspective. While the thrill of that little coup is short-lived, it suggests that Mr. Williams may come up with something more substantial with his next feature.

This is a heckuva stimulating cinematic achievement for a relative newcomer. The Human Surge offers a shrewd commentary on the dissonance of technological connectivity and personal communication.

Surreal and wordlessly unsettling, Eduardo Williams' globe-crossing feature The Human Surge is intimate and pleasurably inscrutable.

Lacking in narrative or character (the film is all theme and no story), the payoff moments for all one's carefully invested attention are few and far between.

In Williams' film, this pulse of energy is everywhere, running through and between all of the subjects: human, animal, material, ambient, and machinic.

There are two bravura shots in The Human Surge... Otherwise, well, it's tough going.

Williams's bewildering, sinuous film encourages us to realise that getting lost is a destination in itself.

There is something exasperating in the way it withholds the pleasures of film from its audience, allowing long stretches to unfold with no lighting and semi-audible dialogue.

Starting in Argentina, ranging to Mozambique and the Philippines, The Human Surge picks figures from the blur of the modern world and depicts them in shadowed motion, language an indistinct gesture, too.

Williams is a gifted director who only has better films in front of him; he appears to be a guy with a concise vision making exactly what he wants to make. Which might be why The Human Surge can't quite connect: Williams only made this for himself.

This conundrum that can be found all over the Internet, to be sure, but rarely with such enigmatic eroticism or breathtaking technique. Like the best nonfiction work of the past few years, it encourages us to look differently at every moving image we see.