Zoom 2016

The film unfolds as a rich, metafictional tapestry that sits at the crossroads of three distinct creative lives, each living in a separate reality yet actively shaping the others. It presents a layered interface where a comic artist, a novelist, and a film director each author a version of one another, blurring lines between imagination, flesh, and cinema. This is not a single story so much as a conversation between worlds, where control and vision travel across mediums as characters debate, undermine, or reinforce one another.

In one thread, the artist is Emma Boyles, a graphic storyteller who labor fascinates the mind as much as the body. Working in a sex doll factory in Toronto, she harbors a private and intimate fantasy about having larger breasts. She pursues augmentation, hoping to become the version of herself she imagines on the page. However, the procedure leaves her unsettled, and the promised transformation proves elusive, feeding a sense of regret and disquiet that reverberates through her creative work. As her personal body story collides with the hallucinated panels of her comic book, the boundaries between reality and representation begin to crumble. Emma’s frustration with being unable to control her own body becomes a catalyst that drags her and her friend Bob into increasingly dangerous territory—where drug deals and shootouts intrude on their daily lives, complicating everything she thought she understood about power, agency, and consequence. The more her drawings influence her world, the more the line between creator and character dissolves, leaving Emma to navigate a maze where choices in one realm ripple across all others.

Meanwhile, the film’s second axis follows Edward Deacon, a successful action movie director who aspires to pivot toward arthouse cinema even as he has long relied on his sexual charisma to bend circumstances to his will. Edward’s career is defined by momentum—fast cuts, high stakes, and the swagger of a man who can command scenes and bodies alike. Yet Emma’s evolving frustration and the implications of her comics begin to seep into his projects. In a provocative turn, Emma’s graphic storytelling literalizes inside his world when she uses her craft to alter the content of his film alongside his desire for control—specifically, in her comic book she changes the scale of Edward’s own persona, dramatically reducing the symbolic power of his body. This act destabilizes the movie he’s trying to marshal, provoking a slide from auteur intent into mounting studio interference. The more Edward tries to preserve his cinematic integrity, the more his control erodes, revealing how the pressures of production and the pressures of desire can rewrite a director’s own vision.

On the third axis, there is Michelle, a model who is also climbing the ladder of fiction as a novelist. Her goal is to establish herself in the literary world, but she discovers that the film about her life—being built by Edward and populated by Emma’s drawings—has become a living thing that doesn’t always honor her voice. As Edward’s movie about Michelle shifts toward a traditional Hollywood blockbuster, her ability to write feels compromised; the characters she creates in her pages begin to act with a vitality that complicates her original intentions. Michelle’s attempts to steer Emma’s story back toward coherence grow increasingly adventurous and improbable, as if every quiet moment of prose is pulled into a louder, more sensational television or cinema cadence. The friction between authentic authorship and mass-market spectacle becomes a central tension, forcing Michelle to contend with how much of her narrative still belongs to her when external forces start rewriting the plot from the outside in.

Together, these three threads form a dense, interlocking web where each creator’s act of making a story becomes the material for another. The film treats reality as something negotiable, mediated by the pages of a comic, the chapters of a novel, and the takes of a director’s camera. Characters attempt to shape not only their own destinies but the destinies of the others, creating a continuous feedback loop where invention affects reality and vice versa. The result is a contemplative, multi-dimensional experience that stays grounded in human emotion—desire, frustration, and the longing for control—while exploring how art can both illuminate and complicate the lives it seeks to repurpose.

If you’re drawn to stories about how creators influence reality, this film offers a patient, thoughtful exploration of power dynamics across three art forms. It invites you to notice how small changes in one medium can cascade into large, sometimes destabilizing shifts in another, all while maintaining a steady, even-handed tone that remains curious rather than sensational. The narrative never simplifes its questions; instead, it deepens them, inviting audiences to consider what it means for art to govern life—and for life to govern art—in a world where the lines between authors and characters are perpetually in flux.