Are we able to sacrifice everything for a life we know nothing about, in exchange for something we can’t predict? What is it like to feel something? The protagonists of Turn Me On don’t know much, because mysterious vitamins have taken everything away from them – all worries, doubts, but also feelings. With a leftover free will, they reach for the unexpected to start living truly their own way for the first time. Only will they like it?
The Our Friends corporation, as part of its project, has created a drug that strips all feelings from people who choose to enter this experiment. They leave everything behind – their families, their memories, their entire lives. They are paired with other members of the project, given new jobs, apartments, friends, but also vitamins and meals in tubes that they eat every morning. Their lives are not governed by any form of chance, as everything is absolutely planned in advance by Our Friends – including the decision to adopt a child, a message that pops up on the TV during the only TV show that is broadcast.
And that’s how we meet Joy (Bel Powley) and William (Nick Robinson), who live this life of one-upmanship until the health center calls Joy in for an examination. The woman learns the results of the tests, which show that she has tumors. They can be removed, but for one day Joy must stop taking vitamins. She agrees to do so, and the excitement she begins to experience pleases her so much that not only does she reject taking the pills every day, but she persuades Will and their friends to do the same. Together they discover a world of pleasure, happiness, but also jealousy and sadness. Will the enormity of their new emotions overwhelm them too much? Will they be able to find some order in the entropy?
Michael Tyburski shows us a world we already know from many concepts, but the offbeat atmosphere he shows us in this intimate world of Joy and Will is really appealing to the viewer. Together with them, we get to know everything anew, reveling in smiles, touches and pleasures. We appreciate what we had, but what we forgot we had. Because sometimes all it takes is the sound of the sea, one step into the unknown, to savor freedom enough to never be able to look at the world through half-closed eyes again.
The film Turn Me On (directed by Michael Tyburski) is screened at 18th Mastercard OFF CAMERA as part of the American Indies section, of which the Galeria Krakowska is a partner.
Kinga Majchrzak