Everything Else is Noise (2026) Toronto 2026 NYFF 2026

Guy- I feel your pain

Nicolás Pereda who had Lazaro at Night at NYFF a few years back returns with a film that is a variation on the earlier film with musicians/ composers coming together when one of them is interviewed and talking about life.

This is very much a NYFF typical art house film. It’s a film that very much wants to talk about life but isn’t really about it. Director Pereda says he is not interested in realism or hyper-realism but in talking about it, but he does so in a rather uninvolving way. By disconnecting from any notion of realism, we have no way to connect to what is happening on screen. Nor do we have any desire to pay attention because we are not connected to life or any sort of life, even a fake one. This is kind of dull. While I understand the director doesn’t want to show life, so the result is all artifice and pretention.

Running an over long 70 minutes this film’s first five minutes are images of a traffic jam outside a window while a cello plays. Why? Because. From we get artificial turns and conversations that exist for no reason other than to make it seem like something like a narrative is happening. Instead of just having the interview and conversation happen we get technical issues with the recording equipment and power outages. Why? Because it some how reflects on how we communicate or something.

I know I am going to catch hell from fans of the director, but to be honest I have had issues with his earlier films, though not to this extent. For me Pereda has something genuinely interesting things to say, but he doesn’t know how to present them. Its as if he is trying to make an engaging film from a philosophical treatise but doesn’t know how to open it up. There are some interesting ideas here, but I was bored by everything else, particularly the presentation.

What pisses me off about this film is that the ideas expressed in the film are very much about life, but the film itself, like much of Pereda’s work, feels like the work of a man who is very much of the current generation, someone who has lots of ideas of what life is and how it should be lived but who is too terrified or perhaps to incapable of actually connecting to the life he wants to comment on.