THE STORY – The future. Winter. Space travel is no longer a dream. A once-thriving film studio faces bankruptcy. The enormous compound, with structures ranging from the Great Sphinx of Giza to the Forbidden City, is now completely covered in snow and stripped of its former glory. Zha, a lonely janitor, tends to this forgotten place, with only a cat that used to perform in films for company. Running out of money, the studio owner gives him a VR headset as partial compensation. Zha is immediately drawn into the virtual world and embarks on a romantic journey with a female player who invites him on a trip to the moon. Meanwhile, the studio, which is about to close permanently, is temporarily brought back to life when a film crew arrives to shoot an alien invasion movie on the expansive backlot – with the studio’s actual destruction slated to be shot as the movie’s final showdown.
THE CAST – Da Peng & Qing Yi
THE TEAM – Xu Zao (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
Rather than speculating on the future, “Light Pillar” treats science fiction as a postmortem, examining what remains when cultural industries outlive their purpose. Xu Zao’s debut feature imagines a world in which private space travel has been fully normalized, but cinema has been quietly rendered obsolete. Progress, in this vision, does not arrive through rupture or violence. It arrives administratively. What follows is not collapse, but maintenance—a state of prolonged suspension that the film both depicts and, at times, inadvertently mirrors.
Set on the grounds of a bankrupt studio, the sprawling backlot now functions as an archive of discarded illusions. Snow blankets replicas of the Sphinx, the Forbidden City, and other monuments that once symbolized global mythmaking through cinema. Stripped of context and spectacle, these structures register less as landmarks than as props left behind after history has moved on. Xu does not romanticize decay. He treats it as infrastructure, presenting cinema not as magic, but as an industry that has continued operating long after its cultural relevance has been exhausted.
Zha, the film’s solitary janitor, is both caretaker and casualty of this prolonged afterlife. Having worked on the lot for over two decades, he now lives among its frozen remains, his days defined by repetition rather than purpose. Snow is shoveled, sets are inspected, and meetings circle endlessly around unpaid wages. Sealed but empty payslips become the film’s clearest image of labor under normalized precarity, while the studio owner offers only indifference, presenting Zha with a false choice between acceptance and disappearance. Xu’s minimalist animation style reinforces this state of suspended obsolescence. Flat compositions, muted palettes, and economical movement drain the world of expressiveness, mirroring both Zha’s interior life and the institutional logic surrounding him. Emotion is not denied but withheld. Even intimacy is reduced to residue. Zha’s only companion is a cat that once appeared in films, now lingering on the lot without sentiment or explanation, a parallel presence defined by shared irrelevance.
The film’s central rupture arrives when Zha is given a VR headset as compensation for unpaid labor, a gesture that replaces material security with access. Once inside the simulation, “Light Pillar” executes its most aggressive formal shift as animation gives way to live action. The virtual space is rendered through handheld camerawork, saturated neon lighting, and constant motion, creating a realm that feels volatile and alive in contrast to the regulated stillness of reality. There, Zha meets a young gamer who draws him into a romantic journey defined by movement rather than dialogue, proximity rather than intimacy, culminating in a moonward escape that functions as a symbolic release rather than a narrative resolution.
It is here that the film’s pacing issues become most pronounced. As the live action sequences accumulate, their initial shock begins to dissipate, and the lack of narrative escalation becomes increasingly apparent. Scenes linger without development, repetition replaces progression, and the film’s meditative rhythm gradually slips into inertia. The aggressive visual language of the simulation starts to clash with the stillness of the animated world, producing tonal dissonance rather than productive contrast. Instead of deepening the film’s examination of escapism, the simulation increasingly functions as an interruption. What begins as a structural counterpoint risks becoming aesthetic indulgence, pulling focus away from the film’s most incisive observations.
This resistance to narrative momentum becomes even more evident with the arrival of an external threat. A production crew enters the studio grounds to shoot an alien invasion movie, planning to document the real destruction of the backlot as part of its final spectacle. The metaphor is unmistakable. Cinema consumes its own physical remains in pursuit of relevance. Yet Xu treats this development with striking passivity. There is no mounting urgency, no temporal pressure, no confrontation that forces Zha to articulate what this place has represented in his life. The studio’s erasure is presented as inevitable rather than tragic, reinforcing the film’s thematic concerns while simultaneously flattening its dramatic potential.
This passivity reflects the film’s broader reluctance to synthesize its ideas. “Light Pillar” gestures toward labor exploitation, the erosion of artistic spaces, virtual intimacy, and generational displacement, but rarely allows these themes to intersect in ways that generate dramatic consequences. Zha functions more as a conceptual anchor than as a fully developed character; his eventual decision to disappear alongside the studio registers as poetic abstraction rather than earned resolution.
Still, Xu Zao demonstrates a strong visual intelligence. The film’s animation, in its restraint, reveals a clear understanding of how form can articulate institutional fatigue and emotional depletion. Individual images linger even when the narrative stalls. A lone figure dwarfed by artificial monuments. Snow erasing history in real time. Fantasy glows brighter than lived experience. These moments suggest a filmmaker attuned to the textures of contemporary alienation. With sufficient visibility, “Light Pillar” could plausibly appear on a handful of long lists in the Best Animated Feature conversation, particularly in years that reward formal ambition and conceptual originality over narrative cohesion. At the same time, its limitations are unmistakable. This is clearly a first feature, defined by confidence in atmosphere but uncertainty in structure. Xu shows an instinct for visual metaphor and tonal control. Yet the film would benefit from greater narrative discipline and thematic compression, qualities more consistently demonstrated by seasoned contemporaries in the animated field.
All of this makes “Light Pillar” an intriguing but incomplete work. It operates less as a fully realized narrative than as a conceptual study, observing the afterlife of cultural institutions without fully interrogating their collapse. Like the abandoned studio at its center, the film remains rich with implication—arresting to inhabit, but still waiting to be activated.
