From its first moments, The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave is dizzying. Using a fragmented cartography of eccentric virtual communities within the online video game Second Life, the filmmakers have developed a fascinating documentary on the porous boundary between the real world and its ever-encroaching digital chimera.

From the at-times ecstatic stories of experiences the film’s subjects have had online, The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave gradually builds into a strange and captivating ratio print. From the map to the land, from the interface to the soft matter of digital images, but also from the anonymous day-to-day in residential suburbs to the fantasy of a refuge beyond the reach of time and social mores, the filmmaker’s trajectory serves to narrow the divide between existence and “second lives.”

The film is impregnated with a sense of unreality, and its subjects’ avatars seem to alternate for one another, haunting a sensitive world that has become a crutch or prothesis to all these dreams. The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave expresses a conscious (and slightly alarming) take on the quiet abandonment of the old social world and its pre-determined dispersal into a digital limbo.

Terence Chotard
Filmmaker

Share this film