The Bitcoin Car (2024)
dir. Trygve Luktvasslimo
Rated: N/A
image: ©2024 Lukt Studios
We’re not even a month into 2024, and I already have a contender for most bonkers movie of the year. Coming from Norway, The Bitcoin Car is a tragicomic musical about a small village that begins to experience troubling phenomena when a brand-new bitcoin mining facility starts operations. This movie has it all: an irrepressibly upbeat song about how death unites us all, singing electrons, an anti-capitalist worldview, and a goat named Chlamydia.
The debut feature from Norwegian filmmaker, writer, and visual artist Trygve Luktvasslimo, The Bitcoin Car premiered at a fest in its country of origin in June of 2023 and had its international premiere at Slamdance 2024, the film festival that was created in the shadow of Robert Redford’s brainchild, the Sundance Film Festival. Slamdance primarily focuses on features made for under a million bucks, and, to give you an idea of the kind of films the fest programs, its founders created it as a response to their own films being repeatedly rejected by Sundance.
In the opening minutes of the film, we see our hero, Gloria, driving her Toyota to the airport to pick up her brother, Lukas, who is coming home from college for the summer. There’s something a little strange about her car. It practically glows, shining with the solid gold plating that Gloria had installed as a way to – in her words – pimp out the car.
She has to explain to Lukas where she got the money for this upgrade. A mysterious billionaire crypto investor has built a massive bitcoin mining complex – the gargantuan building is also gold-plated and shines luminously like Gloria’s car – in the siblings’ sleepy little village.
The investor built her bitcoin mine on top of the local graveyard, where Gloria and Lukas’s parents are both buried. When Lukas asks where the bodies were relocated, Gloria has the hard job of telling him that they weren’t.
This callous billionaire simply removed the headstones and built her facility right on top of all the corpses. As a backhanded compensation for the desecration, she doles out a pittance, €5,000, to each resident, and Gloria, furious about not being able to do a thing about it, pimped out her old Toyota as a way to get rid of the money.
Director Luktvasslimo, who also wrote the screenplay, made Gloria a character who is close to the soil. She studied agriculture in college, raises chickens and goats on her land, and uses an ancient Norwegian method of cooking food using holes in the ground. She represents the polar opposite of the new digital economy, where people with enough money and power can do as they please, the wishes of those around them be damned.
In one searing sequence, Gloria laments to her brother the truism that we’re all grappling with and that is the prime mover in the degradation of our planet and the exploitation of the working class: “Power reigns.”
Lukas chides his sister during this rant, telling her that she sounds like “a social media troll.” As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that Gloria is right. Lukas finds a boiled fish on the shore as he takes a dip in the ocean. (The residents of the village were told that the bitcoin operation would use the local seawater to cool the thousands of computers needed to mine the digital currency, which would turn wintertime swimming into a delight.)
Later, Gloria discovers that her beloved pet goat, Chlamydia – years ago, to ease Lukas’s grief in the aftermath of their parents’ death, Gloria let her brother name their goats, and he promptly named them all after STIs – is dead, its brown hair turned completely white.
The crypto billionaire has a diabolical plan involving the bitcoin mining operation, and it’s up to Gloria and Lukas to uncover what’s going on inside the building.
The siblings enlist the help of a local engineer named Viljami, who works to capture any escaped electrons set loose by the bitcoin mining. During good-natured Viljami’s song about himself, singing electrons accompany him in hilarious chipmunk falsetto. (This isn’t the first time we see the electrons, as they also sing backup for the billionaire in her song outlining her motivations.)
The little gold creatures with razor-sharp teeth appear on either side of the engineer, accompanying him in the song about himself. I’m guessing these adorable, goofy creations are the product of CGI – like each gold-plated item we see that has an ethereal glow to it – but they look like little hand puppets floating in mid-air. We’re also treated to a rockin’ accordion solo from Viljami during the number.
For as seriously as The Bitcoin Car takes its themes of exploitation by the rich and the destruction of our planet caused by technology, it’s also joyously silly. There are ten-or-so original songs in this musical, and each one would fit right in with the offerings of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. (American audiences will most likely be familiar with the competition due to the 2020 Will Ferrell/Rachel McAdams comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga that gently pokes fun at the European phenomenon.)
Luktvasslimo pads his 94-minute film with some filler. There’s a birthday song that comes midway through the film that feels out of place, especially considering the context in which we hear it. There is also a liberal amount of expositional dialog that, at its most awkward, borders on preachy. A few fleeting moments within the picture brought to mind another, decidedly less effective and entertaining screed against man-made environmental destruction, James Nguyen’s 2022 outsider art curio Birdemic 3: Sea Eagle.
But the ambitious and absolutely bonkers vision that Luktvasslimo crafts makes up for its shortcomings. As I mentioned at the top of the review, one of the final songs in the film’s climax is an irrepressibly upbeat, soaring tune that celebrates our connection to one another through death:
“Death unites us
Because we are left alive
Love is forever
We leave something behind”
Who can’t be inspired by that?
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- The Bitcoin Car walks an incredibly fine line of serious themes and irreverent, goofy fun. It’s a movie that almost has to be seen to be believed.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I never got to the performances in the review, but they are all light and breezy when the scene calls for it but serious when it’s appropriate. As Gloria, Sunniva Birkeland Johansen keeps a knowing, impish smile in her back pocket, ready to be employed at a moment’s notice. Henrik Paus plays her brother with a constant look of perplexity about what’s happening around him. I wanted to give Johannes Winther Farstad, as Viljami, a good natured and big-hearted hug. Zoe Winther-Hansen brings a weird ethereal quality to her performance as the mysterious bitcoin billionaire. As an American and a native English speaker, I was thrilled to see England Brooks-Ellingsen, an American actor and singer who now resides in Norway, pop up as the preacher at a local church. Brooks-Ellingsen’s singing voice is lovely.
- One of the refreshing things that I love about international cinema is the willingness to include a mix of languages within one film. Some might find that distracting, but if English subtitles are included for any non-English dialog, I am absolutely overjoyed to hear different languages come and go during a movie.
- Luktvasslimo uses a rather wide aspect ratio to capture the beauty of the film’s landscapes. The Bitcoin Car is often a beautiful movie.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this via a screening link. I wish I could tell you when and where you can see it, but I have no idea. Keep your eyes peeled for it!
————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
If you read my Top Ten piece last week, you’ll know that I confessed to struggling recently with depression due in large part because of the current state of our politics. I also mentioned that I wanted to shine a light on issues unrelated to movies that are important to me. So, here it is. I don’t even have a name for this feature yet, but I don’t want to waste any time.
This week, I want to focus on something happening in my home state of Texas. Did you have any idea that the current governor of the state, Greg Abbott, is defying the federal government’s authority when it comes to border security? He’s doing it in a shameless attempt to gin up hatred against migrants and whip up his base into a frenzy of reactionary, anti-government lunacy.
I’ll likely be leaning on links to other articles for this feature, and I want to turn it over to a newsletter that I recently discovered which is devoted to discussing Texas politics. I have zero affiliation with this website, but the author is saying important things about our state’s political situation.
Knowledge is power, and it’s the basic duty of citizens in a democracy to be informed about what’s being done in our names. Please take a few minutes to learn more about what the Texas governor is doing in the naked pursuit of power:
Is Greg Abbott Intentionally Trying To Trigger Right-Wing Violence In Texas?