Eerily beautiful and hauntingly grotesque, this dramatic visual documentary borrows cinematic devices from Kubrick's opening sequence in The Shining to give visual reality and psychological gravity to the horrors of the Alberta tar sands. Wordlessly we are forced to see ourselves and recoil.
Here, in silent, aerial tracking shots, a gradually audible heart beat intertwines with unearthly choruses, and we have the uneasy feeling of a malevolent supernatural presence looking down upon us imperceptibly controlling our destiny. But as breathtaking vistas give way to vast tracts of scarred earth saturated in toxic pools of bitumen sludge, life obliterated, it is apparent that the malevolent presence is us. And we become both the passive horrified witness stuck in a nightmare, our face contorted in a silent perpetual scream, and simultaneously, we are the omnipotent force of destruction defiling beauty and truth in the pursuit of shot-term profit, pleasure and convenience.
The question is: now that we have seen the true picture of who we are (our photo's been hanging on the wall outside the ballroom at The Overlook Hotel since 1921, but haven't we always known it?), do we use the power of our self-knowledge for good, stop our drunken killing spree, change our ways, and stand with our family? Or, like demented Jack Torrance, do we carry on in our delusion that the malevolent presence destroying our planet is someone else, let the imaginary bartender pour us another drink, and sit down helplessly in the snowstorm waiting for hell to freeze over?