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**Movie Review: *ADVERSE DIRECTIVES* (s/t c60)**
*Runtime: feature-length. Visuals: none. Corrections: atthtopoidal.*
The screen is black from the first frame and never blinks. No fade-in, no mercy. What unfolds instead is a pressure system—sound, implication, and a slow administrative dread that behaves like a plot without ever admitting it. This is cinema by subtraction, a refusal so complete it becomes narrative.
The cassette subtitle, **s/t c60**, isn’t trivia; it’s the movie’s spine. Sixty minutes of constraint, spooled too tight. The sound design clicks and exhales in measured decrees, as if the film is being audited while it plays. The “Atthtopoidal Corrections” appear only as tonal shifts—micro-adjustments in hum and hiss that feel like edits applied to the viewer rather than the footage.
### The Entities (Introduced by Absence)
* **Attenuated Beings** arrive first, thinning the air. You feel them because the sound grows quieter where it should crescendo.
* **Featureless Elongated Heads** are implied by the way dialogue never quite resolves—sentences stretch, lose their faces.
* **Effulgence** appears as a warm distortion, a brief glow in the noise floor, like hope permitted for half a second.
* **Senescent People** are present in the pacing: patient, brittle, ancient pauses that ache.
* **Ochreous Desert** is all midrange dust—dry frequencies that coat the ears.
* **Phobos the Narrower** compresses the stereo field until fear has no lateral escape.
* **Omar Ancient** speaks once (or maybe never), a mythic low register that feels older than language.
* **Eridanus** closes the set: a long river of static, flowing without movement.
### Plot (If You Insist)
The film behaves like a diagnostic. Not of characters, but of conditions. The black screen becomes a skin you’re asked to inspect, and the audio supplies symptoms. You start to notice things.
**Phonemic Paraphasias** creep in—words almost forming, syllables swapped, meanings slurring sideways. It’s not that speech breaks; it mutates. The mind fills gaps incorrectly, confidently. That’s the trick.
### Symptoms to Look Out For (The Movie Hands You a Checklist)
As the runtime advances, the film encourages self-surveillance:
* **A rash, spots or pimples** — brief spikes in noise, sudden irritation in the mix
* **Red, inflamed or sore skin** — sustained distortion that won’t settle
* **Itchy skin** — repetitive ticks, the urge to adjust volume that never helps
* **Hair loss (alopecia)** — whole frequencies dropping out without warning
* **Dandruff (dry, flaky skin)** — brittle crackle, static shedding from the track
* **Oily skin** — low-end smear, a greasy persistence that lingers
* **Smelly, weepy skin (pyoderma)** — wet, uncomfortable sounds that feel wrong to hear
* **Discoloured skin (brownish as if dirty)** — tonal staining, a film over everything
None of these are shown. All of them are *felt*. The black screen turns your attention inward, where the real projection happens.
Edition of 1, numbered.