Michael Gingold writes on Rue Morgue:
Award-winning filmmaker/artist Johannes Grenzfurthner got in touch with the first peek at his new screen project, a surreal study of dread.
Grenzfurthner directed MASKING THRESHOLD, which was recently completed and is now out to festivals, from a script he wrote with Samantha Lienhard, and it features the voice of Ethan Haslam as the nameless protagonist. The synopsis: “Conducting a series of experiments in his makeshift home-lab, a skeptical IT worker tries to cure his harrowing hearing impairment. But where will his research lead him? MASKING THRESHOLD combines a chamber play, a scientific procedural, an unpacking video and a DIY YouTube channel while suggesting endless vistas of existential pain and decay. Glimpse the world of the nameless protagonist in this eldritch tale, which is by no means for the faint of heart.”
“MASKING THRESHOLD is a film about a suffering, stubborn person whose worldview and beliefs are turned on their head, whose dogmas come out against the world and himself,” Grenzfurthner tells us. “My protagonist is queer, so you want to understand the societal pressure on him, you want to understand the trauma he went through, and the burden of his awful illness. But a point comes when sympathy for him dissolves into horror. It’s like watching one of those videos of a car sliding on an icy road, very slow, unable to brake. You watch it, and you know it won’t end well. You just don’t know how bad it is going to be in the end.”
