It feels like Director Phillip Stainsby has a large premise ahead of him that’s just way too big for a twenty minute movie. “Vision Room” has a short time to unfold its story and a large narrative that only has so much space to breathe. Thus what we’re left with is a movie that’s mostly captions and subtitles that establish the mythos, the concept, and the world, and only visits the actual characters sporadically. The movie feels almost like nothing but captions most of the time, and I wanted to see so much more characters doing things and moving the film forward rather than having director Stainsby explain everything to us.
Director Stainsby establishes an interesting world with material for a great feature film, as we’re introduced to a civilization where most citizens of a dystopia spend their time on a virtual reality landscape that keeps everyone else isolated from one another. This is in a mission to enforce political correctness and combat individuality with the illusion that it allows for a better world. Our main character spends his time looking for ways out of the VR system, and away from the digital enforcers within the VR landscape. This becomes troublesome when he breaks away from what’s expected of him within his VR headset.
He then has to figure out if he wants to see what is outside the walls of his own echo chamber. “Vision Room” is a neat idea and a nice concept with seeds for a great science fiction film that’s thought provoking and reflective of our own society. It just doesn’t quite take off as I wished it would have, as there’s a lot of back story, and only twenty minutes to unload it all. So the movie ultimately feels much more like a conceptual pitch and less like a short film. I wouldn’t mind seeing this re-imagined in to a feature film with a bigger budget someday. I think it could end up becoming a classic for folks that love science fiction with substance and intellect.