Ethan Hawke tackles a dual role in the cryptic pandemic mood piece Zeros And Ones

Abel Ferrara is a poet of personal apocalypses and self-created hells; his anti-heroes exist in the shadows of anguish, addiction, and sin. Nonetheless, he has never made a film as murky as Zeros And Ones. An ultra-low-budget response to the early months of the pandemic, produced guerrilla-style under lockdown in Rome, it captures that dystopian cultural moment’s emptiness, longueurs, and sense of disconnection. It’s all one long dark night, a grungy smuggled noir of the digital wasteland, and we’re never really sure what’s going on, except that a lot of it involves characters watching things on screens. That, too, feels dead-on accurate.

In an ambiguous dual role, Ethan Hawke plays a military operative named J.J. and his equally mysterious missing brother, Justin, who’s some kind of revolutionary. (Curiously, Hawke also addresses the audience out-of-character in clips that bookend the movie.) There’s a terrorist bombing involved (it’s visualized through a crude effect), and some kind of mission—though whether J.J. has come to Rome on official business or on his own is unclear. On the sidelines are intimations of modern paranoia: unknown agencies, militarized police, suspicious Russian agents.

It’s arguable that we aren’t really meant to follow the cryptic plot. Best known for the grimy New York classics Bad Lieutenant and King Of New York, Ferrara has also managed to put his stamp on everything from rape-revenge movies (Ms. 45) to vampire films (The Addiction) to cyberpunk (the underrated William Gibson adaptation New Rose Hotel, arguably the Ferrara film Zeros And Ones most closely resembles). But since relocating to Rome, he has turned his attention inward, ruminating on creative and domestic life in Pasolini and the autobiographical Tommaso. While Zeros And Ones hints at a return to his genre-film roots, it’s basically a ruminative work: a scuzzy mood piece on the state of the (unreal) world.

Working with the cinematographer and indie stalwart Sean Price Williams, Ferrara mines a grainy, ominous surveillance aesthetic. Shaky handheld digital camerawork steals footage of a masked Hawke walking through Rome’s depopulated streets; nocturnal drone shots glide coolly overhead. The eeriness and unease of the pandemic is met by a sense of the perverse: kisses exchanged through masks, a drug dealer spritzing bills with sanitizer. One particularly seedy scene involves sex, guns, and a Loreena McKennitt song. There are, too, the usual Ferrara standbys: the impression of a descent, the self-destruction, the monologues about religion. (“Jesus was just another soldier… But on whose side?”)

What does it all add up to? In conventional thriller terms, not much. As heavily as the movie relies on surveillance footage, a lot more seems to be happening off-camera; the story is, at best, incomplete. We don’t really know where these characters’ loyalties lie, who anyone is working for, who’s keeping J.J.’s brother captive, or whether he’s even alive. It’s a cliché of spy movies—aired most recently in the James Bond send-off No Time To Die—that the black-and-white conflicts of old have been replaced with faceless threats. But for those films, the sentiment is mostly a way to dress up tropes that have remained unchanged since the Cold War. What Zeros And Ones conveys, in its shoestring terms, is the actual mood of a world of uncertainties.