Metta Via: a story of personal transformation with a strange power and attraction

Warren Flanagan, “Metta Via” (2017)

Visually stunning and ambitious in its concept, this Canadian short work is possessed of unusual power. Superficially it lacks an obvious plot and for all I know it may actually be a proof-of-concept work for a movie inspired by existential themes. In a temple-like spacecraft, a young woman, Evelyn (Stacey Armstrong), awakens as if having been birthed in an artificial womb. Around her, strange machines with flashing coloured disks that may reference the concept of chakras (focal points of energy in the human body in Tantra Buddhism or Hinduism) communicate with one another in an equally odd alien language. These machines clearly expect something of this young woman; they detach the life support systems that have sustained her and push her gasping onto the floor. Apparent memories flash in front of her and for a short while, her earliest memory – of living on a farm in picture-postcard-perfect Switzerland as a small girl, being beckoned by a white-clad figure (Armstrong again) to follow while all around spaceships bearing the symbols of the machines that have kept Evelyn alive hover in the sky – holds her spellbound. Presumably other memories come to the fore, stay a while and flash back into her unconscious mind. Evelyn seems to come to a decision and strides towards a blinding white light, her physical body falling away and the life-force that maintained it becoming pure energy. As she enters through the Blankness, the machines behind her roar approvingly and ask her if she is still present within. Evelyn affirms that she is, and moreover there are others like her within.

The plot is so vague that many meanings and interpretations can be placed upon it. The woman may be in a grey zone between incarnations and her entry into the white Blankness may be her passing into a new universe where she will take up her new body. Only her consciousness will retain anything of past lives in previous universes. Alternately Evelyn may be ascending to another level within the current universe: a level we humans cannot understand, but one where Evelyn and others who have ascended before may look back or look down on us, and perhaps try to intercede to shape a particular direction to global cultures so we humans don’t destroy the planet through our foolish and thoughtless actions. At the very least, a personal transformation is taking place, one from which a person cannot return to a previous state of existence.

The spacecraft settings are lavish yet at the same time rather alien-looking, eerie and reminiscent of ancient pagan temples where animals might be sacrificed and their various organs offered to the gods or used in a divination ritual. A debt is owed to past inspirational films like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”. Actor Stacey Armstrong, having no monologue or dialogue to express, conveys all the wonder, the surprise, the fear and the determination her character needs in undergoing what might be a traumatic birth or rebirth, or simply coming out of a long period of aestivation, into another state of existence. The animation and special effects are impressive, and one does get the feeling of a mighty alien space civilisation capturing human children, somehow bringing them up and maturing them into adults, and then once those adults have become conscious and aware, using that conscious force for its own ends. Do the machines that bring Evelyn awake have an altruistic agenda in doing so? Or are they planning to use Evelyn and any abilities she may have to persuade her fellow human beings to submit to their power?

Perhaps it is the film’s capacity to be all interpretations while not favouring any one in particular that gives it its power and attraction.