It’s December 2020, and Joe Hunting has started to film how young people are dealing with the pandemic. Thankfully, there’s no need to social distance, and from the footage he’s captured, it looks like life is going on as normal. Jenny is teaching a sign language class to students, including Kermit the Frog. DustBunny is teaching her dance class. Friends, be they animal or hot dog, are holding improv shows and going on dinosaur safaris. In Times Square, people, aliens, and robots celebrate the new year. All of this is documented by Joe with a handheld camera, in the standard style of cinema verité. Well, “handheld” may not be the right word here since he isn’t holding a camera. At least, not in real life. We Met in Virtual Reality was filmed entirely virtually in the video game VRChat, and it is one of the most unique cinematic experiences I’ve seen in recent memory.
Watching We Met in Virtual Reality was an experience of what I like to refer to as “cinematic dissonance”, where basic classifications of cinema simply don’t apply. The film looks like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and it’s clearly set in real life. Yet, it’s also a documentary shot (yes, shot, with an in-game handheld camera) within a computer-generated environment, and with only a fraction of the participants being visibly human (if not sharing space with copyrighted characters). Animated documentaries and filmmaking in real-time environments have been done before, but the blend of real and virtual presented felt exciting.
As for the film itself, it mainly focuses on six participants. Jenny and Ray_is_Deaf teach virtual sign language classes as part of an organization called Helping Hands. There’s also DustBunny, a dance instructor, and her partner, Toaster. Meanwhile, DragonHeart is in a relationship with IsYourBoi, an exotic dancer, and is planning to propose. The film goes back and forth between their stories, intercutting with other elements of the very massive world of VRChat.
What really makes the film shine is how effective a lot of the movie is at conveying emotional experiences even within the bizarre setting the film inhabits. These are long-distance relationships by nature, and even when they do end up meeting in person, as DustBunny and Toaster recall at one point, they quickly have to deal with the closing of their respective borders due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, the fantastical nature of the environment makes for some truly unique variants of otherwise grounded moments. For instance, once of my favorite scenes involves IsYourBoi preparing her outfit for her wedding with the help of her avatar creators. Not only do the “tailors” have incredibly wide, fanged mouths straight out of a horror film, but the actual dress is part of a completely new body IsYourBoi suddenly morphs into offscreen.
Much of the documentary delves into what it’s like to interact with others in a world where you can be literally whoever you want, offering the opportunity to start over with people you don’t know. Despite some moments of comedy at the scenarios presented, there’s definitely a melancholy aspect to a lot of the film. For all the fun and games, there’s also a lot of talk about when the people appearing in the film will finally get to meet in person again. This is still during the first winter of the pandemic, and this is basically the closest a lot of them can get to social interaction at the moment. It may look bright and colorful, but the pain they go through is real, and if you think that a movie of people playing a video game won’t make you cry, think again.
If I had one criticism, it’s that the experience is a bit too wholesome. It presents a bit of a utopian ideal that seems too detached from reality. While being anything you want with possible anonymity can be liberating, it can also be destructive, and it doesn’t take much research to find examples of this. I’m not saying that it needed to be in there, and the focus is certainly intended to be on the people who have had positive experiences, but it also feels a bit unrepresentative. It’s a minor criticism, though.
Not only is We Met in Virtual Reality a heartfelt portrait of life in the virtual realm, it also hints at an exciting future for virtual filmmaking. The technology isn’t quite there yet (some scenes are noticeably laggy), but it’s still extremely impressive regardless. It’s a tribute to the internet’s ability to connect people from all walks of life and allowing yourself to be presented the way you want to, and if that’s a hot dog or a blue bunny singing pop songs, so be it.
