Review: The Pink Cloud Is a Stylish but Unrevealing Look at Pandemic Living

Where the details of the Covid-19 pandemic are in many ways hopelessly un-cinematic, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s The Pink Cloud immediately establishes a grave and tangible danger in the toxic pink wisps that appear across the globe and kill people after 10 seconds of contact. The quarantine process, too, feels incredibly urgent, leaving individuals without time to grab supplies or find loved ones. People must shelter in place right away, wherever that may be. One woman, Giovana (Renata de Lélis), appears to be one of the lucky ones in this regard, able to retreat to her mother’s spacious home with Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), a man who she met for sex just the night before. All told, the scenario initially feels much too dramatic to accurately reflect our current moment.

We might trace any disconnect between current events and the film’s imagined catastrophe back to what an opening disclaimer informs us: that The Pink Cloud was written by Gerbase in 2017 and shot in 2019, making all of its parallels a weird coincidence rather than an explicit expression of present-day anxieties around the pandemic. But after the urgency of its opening, the film soon reveals a truly eerie level of prescience by capturing an intimately familiar sense of monotony. Deadly though the pink clouds may be, they never seep through doors or windows. Anyone indoors is safe, and in that safety, the only thing to do is wait.

Soon enough, the government rigs up a system of drones and tubes to deliver supplies and facilitate online purchases, allowing the free market to continue after only a minor interruption and some light rebranding. Giovana’s most pressing concern turns out to be boredom, as she realizes that the initial sexual attraction is the only thing that she and Yago had in common. Where she’s restless and desires more from life, Yago grows complacent and eventually worshipful of the cloud. And there is, of course, what turns out to be one of the most significant rifts between them: He wants kids, and she doesn’t.

Unfortunately, this boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity. Though Gerbase directs with a stylishness that never overpowers the characters’ boredom, The Pink Cloud feels like a familiar take on a couple that moved in together too quickly. That Giovana and Yago essentially had no choice in the matter doesn’t reinvigorate the film’s scenario with the depth and fresh perspective that it’s clearly meant to.

Certainly Giovana and Yago’s unique circumstances present new psychological and ethical dilemmas: There’s the question, for example, of whether Giovana becoming pregnant is primarily a way to break up monotony, a result of two individuals reckoning not only with morality but the prospect of never seeing anyone else in person ever again. And even with the best intentions, how ethical is it to indefinitely raise a child in such an environment?

But The Pink Cloud shortchanges these questions by so liberally skipping through vast swaths of time, never quite letting the animosity between its characters and its related quandaries to calcify. And while the logistics of a world’s new normal are clearly not meant to be Gerbase’s focus, the passage of years only emphasizes how little that world seems to change. This stagnant perspective reads less as a conscious choice than a lack of invention when combined with things like the rather typical strife at the film’s center and a general reticence to follow potentially intriguing threads like Yago’s cloud worship for very long. That Giovana and Yago have extremely boring sex is certainly intended as a subtlety of characterization, but it also feels inadvertently indicative of the film’s somewhat limited imagination.

Admittedly, The Pink Cloud may be a victim of bad timing more than anything else. When it was conceived, perhaps its ideas about how relationships might fare when thrown into a pressure cooker felt like hard truths. Now, years into a pandemic of our own, they feel more like quaint common sense. If it adequately and presciently expresses some of our own feelings during this period, that’s not quite the same as having any meaningful insight about them.