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Reviewed by: Andrew Robertson

There is a girl who appears to be lost in a video game. She clambers through a landscape made of repeated fragments of Glasgow, searching for what amounts to an escape in the form of a lift. The cage of its door invites and confines. She moves from one level to another, until she reaches something that approximates a conclusion.

It isn't much to start with, and it doesn't go too far either. The girl is not too bad, interacting with an invisible background thanks to the magic of a blue or green screen. Her spritely running is reminiscent of Hype Williams' work, particularly his videos with Missy Elliot. Of course, when you're cribbing from Nintendo things are going to look familiar. Musically, there isn't too much distance either; the soundtrack consists of James Holden's Idiot, which features noises from the Mario games, and Aphex Twin alter-ego Power-pill's Pacman. Built around recognisable noises and pretty solidly genre they're immediately familiar. Even if you haven't heard them before it will feel as if you have.

While it's got some nice landscapes, it doesn't do anything terribly new. Intended as an examination of deja vu, this is, sadly, something we've seen before. Then there are the little niggles, like a clumsy spelling error in the opening titles - 'Tenemants' is particularly galling from a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. Then (and this is admittedly minor) there's the question of aspect ratios. The film features a Sony PSP, the portable games machine formatted as a movie playback device with an 16:9 screen but appears sized for plain old ordinary television. That might be an artifact of the presentation, but even online versions are formatted that way. Toggle doesn't hit any new buttons, flick any new switches, and whatever its features it doesn't have any replay value.

Reviewed on: 24 Feb 2009
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A young girl explores an animated cityscape.

Director: Joanna Susskind

Year: 2007

Runtime: 5 minutes

Country: UK

Festivals:

Glasgow 2009

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