Strange Days

Ralph Fiennes and a fierce Angela Bassett star in Kathryn Bigelow’s enormously powerful tech noir.

It’s 1999, only two days away from the new millennium and tensions on LA streets are at fever pitch.

Ex-cop Lenny Nero is a peddler of black-market SQUID clips – full-sensory recordings made from illegal surveillance devices that record directly from the wearer’s cerebral cortex, and playback as a full-body experience.

Lenny draws the line at snuff clips, but after a desperate cry for help from his friend Iris, Lenny receives a recording that puts his life in immediate danger.

Curator’s Note

There’s a lot to unpack in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days. Voyeurism, spectatorship and the pervasive male gaze are all interrogated in her thrilling tech noir that hijacks the action film to deliver a stunningly articulate assessment of the genre, and Hollywood cinema more broadly.

The film reflects on the LA riots in 1992 to predict a future with racial tension, police surveillance and personal recording devices. After the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, the roll out of police bodycams, and widespread use of smartphone cameras and wearables – hello Google Glass – Strange Days’ future quickly became our present, then past.

Technology here has a regressive power and can hold our imaginations back or it might just save humanity.

– Reece Goodwin, Curator (Film & TV)