The traditional cinematic contract — the suspension of disbelief in exchange for narrative immersion — is undergoing a quiet mutation. In recent screenings of Better Man, the Robbie Williams biopic directed by Michael Gracey that replaces its protagonist with a digital primate, the theater has ceased to be a dark room for private contemplation. Instead, it has evolved into a site for a loosely structured civic event, where the film itself serves as a backdrop for a shared cultural performance among audience members.
The premise of Better Man is straightforward in its strangeness: rather than casting a human actor to portray Williams, the film renders him as a computer-generated chimpanzee navigating the real world of pop stardom, addiction, and fame. The choice is deliberate, rooted in Williams's own self-deprecating public persona. But whatever the artistic intention, the effect on audiences has been something the filmmakers may not have fully anticipated. When the image on screen is so intentionally uncanny, the audience can no longer lose itself in the frame. The digital avatar acts as a permanent rupture in the narrative, forcing viewers to remain hyper-aware of the technology and the artifice. They are no longer watching a story; they are watching the idea of a story, mediated through a layer of high-fidelity absurdity.
The audience as performer
This dynamic is not entirely without precedent. The history of cinema includes numerous moments where the spectacle migrated from the screen to the seats. The midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that began in the late 1970s established a template for participatory cinema, where callbacks, costumes, and rituals became the primary draw. More recently, sing-along screenings of musicals and communal viewings of so-bad-they're-good films have carved out a niche where the social experience supersedes the narrative one.
What distinguishes the Better Man phenomenon is that the participatory layer is not organized or ritualized. There are no callbacks to memorize, no props to bring. The film's uncanny-valley aesthetic simply creates a persistent gap between what the audience sees and what it can take seriously, and that gap becomes a shared space — a feedback loop where viewers watch themselves watching, signaling their awareness of the spectacle to one another through laughter, side-glances, and murmured commentary. The screening becomes less a consumption event and more a social negotiation of meaning in real time.
This raises a question about the evolving function of the movie theater itself. For decades, the theatrical experience justified its premium over home viewing through superior image and sound. But as home setups have narrowed that technical gap, the theater's remaining competitive advantage may be precisely this: the irreplaceable presence of other people reacting in the same room.
Artifice as catalyst
The broader implication extends beyond a single biopic. As digital tools make photorealistic fabrication cheaper and more accessible, filmmakers face a strategic fork. One path leads toward ever-greater realism — deepfakes refined to the point of invisibility, synthetic actors indistinguishable from flesh. The other path, the one Better Man stumbles onto, leans into visible artifice as a feature rather than a flaw. The uncanny valley, long treated as a problem to be engineered away, becomes a creative instrument.
The distinction matters because each path produces a fundamentally different relationship between film and audience. Invisible artifice preserves the old contract: believe what you see. Visible artifice breaks it, and in doing so, shifts the locus of meaning from the screen to the room. The film becomes a catalyst rather than a destination.
Whether this represents a durable shift in how blockbusters are conceived or merely a novelty born from one film's eccentric creative choice remains an open question. What is harder to dismiss is the underlying tension it reveals: as the tools of digital cinema grow more powerful, the most interesting audience responses may come not from their seamless deployment, but from their conspicuous, even provocative, exposure. The spectacle of the self-aware audience, performing its own knowingness back to itself, may prove to be a more compelling product than anything on the screen.
With reporting from Bright Wall Dark Room.
Source · Bright Wall Dark Room
