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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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The Pink Cloud is not technically a pandemic movie. A title card partway through this trailer says, “This film was made in 2019. Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.”

But the resemblance is certainly there, as a pink cloud descends over the a city, forcing everyone into their homes. Zoom birthdays? Drinking? Boredom? Misery? It’s all here. As The Verge put it, “It has no purposeful connections to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s impossible not to draw parallels between The Pink Cloud and our current reality.”

The Pink Cloud is Brazilian director Iuli Gerbase’s first feature, following six short films. It primarily focuses on two people, Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), who were in the midst of a one-night-stand that, of necessity, becomes something else entirely. (Interestingly, something similar happens in Sarah Hall’s pandemic novel Burntcoat.)

The film follows these two as they grow closer together, have a child, and weather what must be years of life under lockdown. How can a person keep having hope? What is it like for a child to grow up without ever going outside? Though Gerbase wrote her film in 2017, the questions she asks are ones we’ve all been asking for the last two years.

The film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and was met with glowing reviews; Harper’s Bazaar called it “the existential, claustrophobic, cozy, and horny quarantine movie you didn’t know you needed.”

It’s in theaters on January 14th—though to be honest, this feels like a film a person ought to watch at home.


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Molly Templeton

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Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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