Zenith

In addition to Zenith The Film, viewers are encouraged to experience Zenith The Transmedia Experience, which encompasses several websites and YouTube videos, each adding to the movie’s mythology, sometimes with input from fans. (Interested parties should start at crowleylocks.com.) It’s an audacious, impressive feat of imagination, turning a few sets and characters into a generation-spanning look at a society where benevolence and malevolence are so finely interwoven that it’s hard to know what to fight against. Nikolic begins Zenith with a dramatization of the Milgram experiment—the famous psychological test in which test subjects proved willing to commit atrocities if an authority figure ordered them to—and throughout the film and its offshoots, he considers the ways in which we follow trails when prompted.

But while Zenith is fascinating to contemplate as a concept, it doesn’t fully work as a piece of entertainment—at least not in 90-minute-movie form. The film starts strong, introducing Scanavino and Robards while cutting between their initial epiphanies, and it ends strong, too, with father and son facing similar situations before their stories converge unexpectedly. But in between, Nikolic pads out the running time with cheesy-looking sex and fight scenes, and with a doubling-back narrative structure that not only makes the story more confusing, but looks like Nikolic is just trying to save money by reusing footage. People only join a movement if its leaders seem confident and competent. Zenith aces the former, but flubs the latter.