Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Zeros and Ones’ on VOD, in Which Ethan Hawke Roams the Roman Shadows Mid-Pandemic

Now on VOD, Zeros and Ones is a pandemic thriller for art’s sake by Abel Ferrara, the certified nut behind infamous ’90s indie staple Bad Lieutenant. He casts Ethan Hawke as an American videographer-soldier AND his anarchist/communist/terrorist/pick an -ist (as long as it’s not fascist) twin brother, the former on assignment in locked-down Rome, and the latter imprisoned back in the good old U.S. of A. Deducing what Ferrara has to say might be a task fit only for fools, so maybe he’ll kick up a mood or two during these 86 minutes.

ZEROS AND ONES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open on Hawke’s face in closeup, introducing himself as Ethan Hawke. The movie hasn’t started yet — he provides an amiable intro in which he points out that Ferrara isn’t giving us anything remotely “didactic” in regards to the current Covid era, which may be an obvious statement, considering the image of a weeping, naked Harvey Keitel is forever emblazoned in our memories.

On to the narrative at hand: Rome. 2020. MY KINGDOM FOR SOME DECENT LIGHTING. Every scene is a squint into a grainy pitch. A lonely subway train rolls into Rome, and Hawke’s character, J.J., disembarks, walking through the abandoned station and streets. He goes home, at least I think it’s home, washes his hands, chats with a friend or agent via Zoom, leaves, walks a bit, gets a temp check by a soldier, hops in a Jeep, gets vague instructions from a superior — “that’s the news of the world,” “shoot it so they believe it” — and sets off with video camera in hand. It’s night. And even if it isn’t night, It’s always like night in this movie.

He drops in on his brother’s wife and daughter, who wakes up crying. He has a scintillating conversation with the little girl: “What are you dreamin’ about? Fish?” She doesn’t reply, possibly because he’s pretty much the opposite of warm and fun. Next stop, a vague, unidentifiable locale — the movie is full of these — for some white-powder drugs and a glimpse at a tablet computer, which is home to a disturbing video of his brother being shot up with some serum and interrogated. Then, he chats with a homeless man whose cardboard box looks like a coffin in an overhead shot; visits a Muslim prayer room; joins two other soldiers to film them waterboarding a boxer; goes to church so a nun can deliver some cryptic dialogue. There’s more stuff here, including a strange scene with some Russians and a couple troublesome phony-CGI explosions at Roman landmarks. Piece it all together and what do you get? A whole lotta hellifiknow.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I dunno if this impenetrable bullshit is preferable to Michael Bay-produced Covid exploitationist flick Songbird. If so, then just barely.

Performance Worth Watching: Hawke has had a strange career, ranging from the sublime (Boyhood, the Before trilogy) to the grippingly intense (Training Day, First Reformed) to pretentious twaddle (Tesla, Great Expectations). Guess which of the three this movie falls under?

Memorable Dialogue: “Jesus was just another soldier. Another war casualty. But on whose side?” — J.J., via voiceover, proving he’s the life of every party

Sex and Skin: Dark, grainy footage (of course) of two scantily clad women making out.

Our Take: I caught myself dreamin’ about things while watching Zeros and Ones. Things like fish! The film is incomprehensible, ugly to look at and utterly humorless, which is a not nice way of saying it’s “challenging.” Ferrara stirs some of his favorite stuff — sex, violence, religion, sexy violence against religion — into a big pot of early-Covid existential bleakness, and all we can do is accept it as a kind of skanky mood piece, dim and damp and everyone close enough to the camera that we can smell their pits. Perhaps it goes without saying that mass death and isolation linger silently at the margins of the plot, which otherwise begs interpretation. Good luck with that.

Certainly, all this is intentional. Ferrara has a rep as a provocateur, so knock yourself out trying to wring roiling political metaphors from the rag of stern Americans and laughing Russians crossing paths in the skeevy Roman underground, occasionally emerging on the street to make the Vatican go kablooey. I’m sure there’s nuance here in the gritty, pixelated shadows, in Hawke’s personification of an almost-character, in whatever else is going on — read into it as you may. But it’s also eminently dismissable.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite its maddening opacity, I truly believe Zeros and Ones has an audience. It’s just very, very, very small.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Where to stream Zeros and Ones