(Note: The U.S. DVD release is titled “Paranoia: 1.0.”)

Simon J (Jeremy Sisto) is a programmer, and presumably a good one, though he’s too distracted to concentrate on his job. Strange things are happening to him. Already stressed, his mind seems to invent even more upsetting things.

He receives a package, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. It’s empty. He sees people following him, and wonders what his neighbors are up to. He drinks a lot of milk, and the cashier at the store is genuinely disturbing.

Simon asks him, “Is someone following me?”

“Yeah,” the cashier flatly responds.

His neighbors are a genuinely weird bunch, as is the landlord. The neighbor next door to Simon makes grainy pornography, while the man across the hall is creating artificial intelligence in a grotesque robotic head. The landlord films everything in the building, while the maintenance man raves about bizarre conspiracy theories.

Simon continues to recieve empty packages. He buys a padlock and security system, accuses his neighbors and landlord, and still they keep coming. His computer seems to be having problems, and keeps crashing, while his deadlines loom and his bosses get angrier.

This film comes on strong, sucking you into it’s world. It lands somewhere in between Brazil, Naked Lunch, 1984, Delicatessen, The Matrix, and Hitchcock noir. The directors pull this off with aplomb, submerging the film in over-saturated yellows and greens. But it left me frustrated.

The story is absolutely engrossing, until the final act, when it seems to fall apart. It comes off anticlimactic and preachy, which is unfortunate since the tension has been deftly built for over an hour.

The DVD is plagued by technical problems. It wouldn’t play on my PC because of an authoring error, and around 0:33:00, it skipped horribly on my regular DVD player. I examined the disc, and it didn’t appear to be scratched, so I can only assume it was a duplication error. Additionally, the title was changed for the DVD, which necessitated changing part of the title sequence. This was done in video instead of on film (despite it only being 2 seconds long), which means that the entire film is mastered as a 29.97fps hard-interlaced video format, and you see interlacing artifacts.

I felt cheated at the end, because it seemed like such a cop-out. Who would make something this good, and give it an ending that bad? I do recommend that you watch this film, but just skip the end and make up your own. It’s likely to be more plausible, and will certainly be more satisfying.

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