Unhinged, Experimental Sci-Fi On Tubi Is Either Total Genius Or Complete Nonsense

By Robert Scucci
| Updated 35 seconds ago

Have you ever watched something so downright dumbfounding that you didn’t know how to put it into words? 2012’s Hyperfutura falls squarely into that wheelhouse, and I still haven’t decided whether it’s lightning in a bottle or a flash in the pan. It’s a psychedelic journey centering on an unemployed man named Adam (Eric Kopatz), who signs up for a paid three-day medical experiment, and then everything goes off the deep end. The best way to describe what happens in this film is to compare it to that scene in A Clockwork Orange, when Alex has his eyes taped open while watching a wall of televisions, forced to witness and absorb all the horrors of the world as intensely as humanly possible.

The problem here is that there’s no real agenda or objective. Every film site says that Adam becomes a prototype for the first half-man, half-machine, but writer-director James O’Brien shock-cuts his way through the entire thing with such reckless abandon that I’d argue there’s hardly even a plot here. While I admit some of the footage is kind of cool to look at, it’s pretty much just a doomscroll of a movie that repeatedly visits upsetting moments in history while our protagonist is needlessly tortured throughout the film’s entire runtime.

Fortunately, this independent effort is only an hour long, so at the very least you can go into this one knowing that any suffering you’ll experience will be temporary.

Genius Or Pretentious? I Honestly Can’t Tell

Here’s the entire plot to Hyperfutura: Adam gets fired from his machinist job at a factory. He sees a suspicious flyer hanging on a telephone pole stating that if he signs up for a three-day medical experiment, he’ll be compensated. He shows up, is given a pill by a clearly evil doctor (Gregory Kiem), and is then monitored from a surveillance room by a guy known only as the Specialist (Brando McClure), who’s so evil that he even has a twirly mustache to drive the point home.

Adam meets a woman named Simone (Karen Corona), who’s undergoing the same treatment, which, to the best of my knowledge, involves getting tapped with plastic tools while being electrocuted, some drug-addled sensory deprivation, and also overstimulation, depending on how far along they are in the process. I think there’s a romantic bond here, but I can’t tell you for certain. I’m not lying when I say that this movie is basically an hour of stock footage with inverted effects while a bunch of jumbled, disastrous world events are tossed into the editing software as haphazardly as possible.

Cool To Look At, For A Minute

I wanted to check out Hyperfutura because I love vibe pieces that operate in a fugue state. In my mind, I was expecting another film in the same vein as Beyond the Black Rainbow, which also has a barebones plot but vibes so hard that it’ll put you in a straight-up trance. This plays out more like a film student who just got a new computer, complete with free editing software, and decided to cram in as much footage as the free trial would allow. For this joke to work, the free trial lets you render a final product that’s exactly as long as this movie, but not a minute longer.

Hyperfutura’s Wikipedia page cites influences like Ed Wood, The Church of the SubGenius, and even references to James Orin Incandenza, the fictional experimental filmmaker who lives in the pages of David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. I’ve spent the last two weeks revisiting the audiobook after first reading the novel in college, and I’m failing to see any connection here beyond the possibility that whoever curated the information for that rundown thought name-dropping in this fashion would give the film some clout.

Hyperfutura is cool to look at for about a minute. If you can make it through the full hour, you’ll probably wish you’d grabbed a few screenshots to make a cool desktop wallpaper, but outside of that, I’d hardly call it a movie. And if you’re going for that weird “experimental, drug-induced, soul-wrecking odyssey that’s drenched in neon and high-contrast filters” kind of vibe, there’s plenty of brainrot on Instagram that does it better and only takes 30 seconds out of your day. Personally, I’d recommend Nutter Butter’s social media pages because they effortlessly pull off what James O’Brien is trying so hard to do here.

As of this writing, you can stream Hyperfutura for free on Tubi. Seriously, don’t pay for it.