O-1 Visas
Those completely spaced-out folks you see on their commute, at work behind a counter, anywhere really, they give me the creeps. “Sleepless Until I Die,” an eery dance film choreographed by Chorong Yang and co-directed with Jiaqi Yu, features three such characters: an OCD convenience store stockist, an exhausted researcher, and a wandering youth in, natch, a dark hoodie. They seem at first to be just what they are, but their behaviors very quickly devolve into manic rearranging of cleaning products, erratic office gestures, and hallucinatory alleyway movements. Then it gets worse, as in horror movie gross-out worse. Think shadows and crunching. As the sun rises, something even more terrifying occurs: the trio, who’ve ended up madly intertwined in a warehouse, separate, emerge, recompose themselves, and begin the day anew. On a not-so-good morning, I could be one of them.
—Lori Waxman 2025-03-18 12:48 PM