Defrost review: narratively justifying complete incapacity

Many engaging 360 videos have been produced, and precisely none offer any kind of dramatic agency. Purely because they’re videos: beyond gaze tracking they have no interactive capacity. And yet when we watch a 360 video that unfolds from a first-person perspective, viewing the world through a character’s eyes, there’s a natural expectation to be able to do or say something.

Premiering at Sundance in 2016, Defrost is a 12 part series (each episode running for around five minutes) with a memorable justification for our incapacitated virtual selves: the person we embody is a wheelchair-using woman who’s recently awoken from a coma, after a stroke rendered her speechless and immobile. The first lines of dialogue spoken by Joan (voice of Kelly De Sarla) belong to an internal monologue that could be construed as a general statement of frustration from 360 video viewers desiring the freedom to navigate virtual worlds: “I can’t move. Why can’t I move?”

This justification is one of a few thoughtful touches engineered by Defrost’s director, Randal Kleiser, a film industry veteran best-known for directing Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Another, which is a kind of creative workaround, addresses how scenes in a 360 video can be directed without the director themselves being seen. The great Australian artist Lynette Wallworth once told me she called “action!” on her desert-set VR documentary Collisions while hiding behind a bush. Kleiser found a way to hide in plain sight: he appears throughout Defrost as a nurse, dressed in a V-neck top and scrub pants, who operates Joan’s wheelchair for her. He’s a silent presence who goes largely unnoticed; early on we grasp that there’s no point turning around to look at him. If we do, we see him in a low angle immersion, re-emphasising a sense of powerlessness, similar to the impact imparted by low angle shots in traditional films.

In an interview with me conducted for my thesis back in 2020, Kleiser recalled that “the hardest thing I had to do was be neutral the whole time and not react to what I was seeing. If I saw that they (the actors) were not really getting it, I couldn’t make a face…I had to remember what to say to them afterwards, because the character is supposed to be almost a zombie, not really involved in it. Just a hack nurse pushing the girl around. The hard part was not to do anything; to not react.”

Defrost is set in 2045, with Joan awakening from a decades-long cryogenic sleep. The narrative structure rests heavily on one-way monologues divulged by characters who—given the protagonist’s incapacitated state and lack of ability to speak—do not expect a response from the person they’re speaking to. The dialogue unravels information about events that took place while Joan was in a coma; we eventually learn secrets about the cryotherapy center where most of the series takes place.

Joan looks the same but the rest of her family of course are much older. They are Joan’s husband (Bruce Davison), daughter (Tanna Frederick), son (Christopher Atkins), son-in-law (Ethan Rains) and grandson (Clinton Valencia), all sharing a habit of staring intensely into the camera. As does Doctor Bedform, played by Carl Weathers—best-known for playing Colonel Al Dillon in Predator and Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies—who delivers an early, context-delivering slab of exposition, bringing Joan (and us) up to date with her circumstances.

When actors look directly into the camera in VR it creates a striking effect, intensifying our relationship with the narrative universe, as if to say: you are here; you exist in this world. Actors looking into the camera in VR imparts the sense they’re staring into our eyes, which brings us back to expectations around agency and input. None of Defrost is enthralling, but it plays out with a bumpy charm and an endearing spirit of experimentation. Making the protagonist a stroke victim is hardly a long-term strategy on how to improve 360 videos—but it makes sense in this story, and is a creative way of addressing limitations.