Babeldom – review

There's a sort of refrigerated strangeness to this cine-meditation on the concepts of cities and the future, the debut feature-length piece by established short-film maker Paul Bush. It's about a fictional megacity called Babeldom, glimpsed initially through breaks in an icy fog: the Tower of Babel, as imagined by the elder Bruegel. Fascinatingly, it's not an actual model, or an animation, but something in between, and this image segues into perspectives of actual cities – lonely, dark, eerily untenanted places. Bush's own prose-poetry, decanted into two reading voices, tells us how the archaeological past is compacted underfoot while the future wafts airily overhead. These ideas are juxtaposed with computer-modelled graphics, whose purpose is to simulate, re-enact or anticipate the forms and growth patterns of future worlds and cities. There is something of Iain Sinclair, JG Ballard and Italo Calvino here, and of the night-time Paris in Godard's Alphaville: dark, cold and unromantic; a new city of the future.