In the largest cinema at the Venice film festival, guests gather for the premiere of Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s lavish account of a man who dared to play God and created a monster. When the young scientist reanimates a dead body for his colleagues, some see it as a trick while others are outraged. “It’s an abomination, an obscenity,” shouts one hide-bound old timer, and his alarm is partly justified. Every technological breakthrough opens Pandora’s box. You don’t know what’s going to crawl out or where it will then choose to go.
Behind the main festival venue sits the small ruined island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Since 2017, it’s been home to Venice Immersive, the event’s groundbreaking section dedicated to showcasing and supporting XR (extended reality) storytelling. Before that it was a storage facility, before that a plague quarantine zone. Eliza McNitt, this year’s jury president, remembers the time when work on the exhibits had to be paused because the builders had uncovered human bones in the ground. “There’s something haunting about the fact that we come to the oldest film festival in the world to present this new form of cinema,” she says. “We’re exploring the medium of the future, but we’re also in conversation with ghosts.”
There are 69 different monsters on the island this year and these range from spacious walk-through installations to intricate virtual worlds that can be toured in a headset. Frankenstein’s monster, of course, wound up turning on its creator, and McNitt acknowledges that there are similar concerns about immersive art, which tends to be lumped alongside AI in the public mind, folded in with the runaway technology that threatens to consume us all.
“Immersive storytelling is a completely different conversation from AI,” she says. “But there is a genuine fear about what AI means for the film industry. And that’s mostly down to a misconception that you can type a prompt – “make me a movie” – and a movie magically appears, which is absolutely not the case. In practice, it’s about using AI tools to create something personal and unique in collaboration with an enormous team of other dedicated artists.” AI won’t replace people, she adds, “because AI doesn’t have taste”.
‘Each experience demands a leap of faith’ … Xan Brooks, left, experiencing Reflections of Little Red Dot. Photograph: Venice Immersive
McNitt is an early adopter of AI tools and used them most recently on her autobiographical 2025 film Ancestra. Other film-makers, she suspects, are not far behind. “I think there are only a couple of experiences here on the island that are just beginning to experiment with the tools,” she says. “But next year you’re going to see it a lot more involved in all aspects of these projects.”
Immersive storytelling’s berth at the Venice film festival conveniently aligns it with cinema itself and encourages visitors to view it as a natural extension, or the heir to the throne. Several mainstream Hollywood directors have already crossed over. Asteroid, for instance, is a high-stakes space thriller about a mining expedition gone horribly wrong, spearheaded by Doug Liman, the director of Swingers and The Bourne Identity. His producing partner, Julina Tatlock, tells me that the interactive short film effectively returns Liman to his early independent roots and has allowed him to devise and produce a project free from studio constraints. Asteroid is a labour of love and part of a larger story that may yet see life as a straight film feature. “Doug’s obsessed with space,” she says.
Immersive art is to cinema what cinema was to photography. When cinema arrived, it didn’t replace photography
There’s a similarly cinematic quality to The Clouds Are Two Thousand Metres Up, a rapturous arthouse drama in which a bereaved young widower pursues his wife’s spirit through the pages of her unfinished novel. Its Taiwanese director, Singing Chen, has worked in conventional film as well as VR and feels that each form has its strengths. “Immersive art is to cinema what cinema was to photography,” she says. “When cinema arrived, it didn’t replace photography, because the still image has power and value. It affects us in a different way than the moving image.”
The films on the schedule at Venice are largely known quantities. More often than not, we’ll be familiar with the actors and the director and can largely intuit the plot. Whereas the artworks on the island could be almost anything: an immersive video, an installation, a hyperactive adventure or a virtual world to explore. In a space of an afternoon, the visitor can bounce from the arcade-game interactivity of Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro’s Face Jumping to Kate Voet and Victor Maes’s wrenching human drama A Long Goodbye, in which a husband and wife battle the onset of dementia, to Chloé Lee’s excellent, ingenious Reflections of Little Red Dot, which repurposes an old analogue slide projector for a vivid whistle-stop tour of Singapore’s cultural history. Each experience demands a leap of faith and depends on a certain willingness to get lost. You might fall on your face, but you may also achieve lift off.
Visitors tend to wander out in a daze … Dark Rooms. Photograph: Venice Immersive
Three projects stand out from this year’s Venice lineup. Ancestors, by Steye Hallema, is a boisterous ensemble interactive in which visitors are first paired as couples, then organised into extended families and are shown pictures of their descendants on their synchronised smartphones. It’s a rarity among the immersive experiences in that it’s a purely communal affair, joyous and slightly chaotic in the manner of all good happy families. If Ancestors is about the importance of human relationships, then the form and the content are in perfect harmony here.
Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg’s extraordinary Blur (probably the hottest ticket on the island) covers similar ground to Ancestors with its focus on cloning and identity, genesis and extinction, although it takes the form of precision-tooled immersive theatre. It’s head-spinningly strange, provocative and seductive. In the closing moments, the user is approached by an eerie VR version of themselves in old age: an emissary from the future; the shape of things to come. Distressingly, the bald, withered figure that shuffled in my direction looked only a year or two older than I am now.
If there is a real-world equivalent of the Frankenstein scene in which the angry scientists cry “abomination” and “obscenity”, it occurs on the boat ride to the island when a middle-aged Italian man takes issue with the producers of a sensory installation called Dark Rooms. The producers are satanists, he insists. They assure him they are not. “Maybe not,” says the man. “But you have made a work of Satan.” Actually, Dark Rooms is terrific and not satanic at all, even if it does spend the majority of its time underground, in the shadows. Co-directed by Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted-Jensen and Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup, this rites-of-passage tale spirits the user on a jolting, intense trip through the corners of queer subculture, through nightclubs and back rooms and finally out over the sea. It’s brilliant and unnerving and finally rather moving. Visitors, I’m told, tend to wander out in a daze.
In the early editions of Venice Immersive, most stories erred on the side of simplicity, as if to reassure newcomers who might be put off by the technology. But the medium has now gained in confidence. It’s broken out of the nursery and reached adolescence. The work has turned more potent, daring and psychologically complex. It’s no accident that many of the best Venice Immersive experiences are about ancestors and descendants and the links between the two. Nor for that matter that so many of them feature scenes that take place aboard moving trains and fragile bridges and inside open elevators. Whether intentionally or not, the medium is telling us where it is: at an interstitial stage, in transit, in progress. It’s travelling between worlds, busily finding its range as it heads into the future.
