Up/Down: A Drama About Choices Made and Choices to Come

Michael Cooke’s 11-minute drama Up/Down follows a man faced with the length of his life and the brevity of substance in it, the latter of which has now left him in a quagmire. A drama about choices and chances, Up/Down uses a violent break from business as usual to ask some terrible, terrible questions.  

John Carlston (Cooke) does not remember his name. Perhaps he would have preferred to remain in oblivion. Instead, John becomes the face of the disorientation of seeing the lines separating action from reflection fracture and entering a liminal third space which has the condition of confronting you with yourself. Are you a good person? Did you live well? Did you bring joy to others? They are fairly simple questions, in that no one is a layperson in trying to address them, but they are terrifying, Aristotelian questions, in that answering them means facing yourself, and having the rest of the path forward defined by your conclusions. 

One of the interesting choices in the film is in editing, where cutting on action is discarded in favour of a different technique that reinforces the non-physicality of the space John finds himself in. This place, by being beyond the rules and consequences of nature, shows that it is a radical opportunity to reconfigure yourself away from the ego-driven forces that had shaped who you came to be. 

The film combines a sci-fi approach with existentialism into a decidedly theological premise, with a dash of horror thrown in. Mood lighting shifts to a phantasmagoria of colours, people behave oddly and yet no stranger than everyday life, and the need to live well leaves the ghost of a mandate imprinted on our eyelids. 

Up/Down, with its evocation of heaven and hell, introduces the idea of judgement, but with a concomitant evocation of elevators, also implies both choice and need. You decide. How should you live?