By Mónica Delgado

Beyond the power of technology and its control over the libido of teenagers that is posed in Videophilia (And Other Viral Syndromes), it seems that Peruvian filmmaker Juan Daniel Molero also proposes a reading about the consequences of this type of “infection” from female guilt and repression.

Luz (Muki Sabogal) is a teenager open to all kinds of experimentation, who is not afraid to hire a prostitute, take acid on top of a huaca or have sex (or sex cam) with boys she knows via chat. However, after she masturbates while watching a tutorial on Youtube about the pleasure in erogenous zones, Luz experiences a state of new consciousness, incited by the appearance of a doll that comes to life and scares her, expressed in a mise-en-scène that extends a psychedelic trip, but that instead of being rewarding it is illuminating. This “enlightenment” encourages her to change but due to a kind of “pleasure anguish”. This guilt causes a new desire closer to “Thanatos”, and that desire makes her critical to the process that objectifies her as part of an amateur porn informal business.

On one hand, while Luz finds sexual stimuli in a methodical YouTube tutorial (or spends hours watching gore films or posts in Pijamasurf), the other male characters find it through hardcore pornography and amateur recordings. Different processes of arousal and consumption of pleasure.

On the other hand, the guilt that governs the protagonist as a result of this sequence of sexual indulgence, marks the birth of another Luz, muted, hurt or with the desire to be another woman, one that prepares the simulation of her own death as if she wanted to be part of a snuff film. The necessity to be invisible becomes a different answer to this viralization of virtuality in people’s lives. Escaping that alienation that starts from guilt, becomes another type of prison, which absorbs and deforms her from the pixel in delirium.