Volume 7 – Film Review
Directed by Panos Pappas & Despina Charalampous
WARNING! This review contains SPOILERS!
The future has always fascinated me—not just as a place we might arrive one day, but as an idea that keeps folding back on itself. Watching Volume 7, directed by Panos Pappas and Despina Charalampous, I felt like I was pulled into that spiral, where time isn’t marching forward but looping endlessly, asking the same questions in new disguises. What does it mean to escape? What does it mean to remember? And perhaps most haunting of all—what if the revolutions we fight are just part of the same circuit we can never quite break?
The story takes place in “City-Building 7,” a decaying fortress of knowledge and bureaucracy that clings to order even as everything inside is unraveling. Here, we meet Nemon, played with magnetic presence by Kostis Mpountas. He reappears across different lifetimes, unaged and unchanged, like a glitch in history itself. Through him, the film weaves together the lives of Lara (Stela Fyrogeni) and Dione (Kristel Kaperoni), two women caught between love, rebellion, and disillusionment. Each timeline echoes the last, bending back on itself until past, present, and future become indistinguishable.
What struck me most was how deeply human this sci-fi story feels. It’s not about technology or spectacle—it’s about memory, loss, and the weight of choices that never seem to matter as much as we hope they will. Nemon is less a hero and more a question personified: is he a savior, a prisoner, or simply the cruel reminder that escape is an illusion? The film doesn’t answer, and honestly, I wouldn’t want it to.
Visually, Volume 7 is stunning. François Schuiten’s production design creates a city that feels both massive and suffocating, a world built to preserve knowledge but crumbling under its own sterility. Ioan Meltzer’s black-and-white photography gives every frame a ghostly sharpness, while Nikos Kypourgos’ score pulses like memory itself—melancholic, insistent, unforgettable. Even the grunge-inspired minimalism of Supreet Singh Dhanju’s VFX feels intentional, like the imperfections of a memory struggling to hold its shape.
And yet, for all its bleakness, there’s humor here too—dry, dark, and absurd. An escape plan made of edible rope? It’s tragic and funny at once, the perfect metaphor for the futility of rebellion and the ridiculousness of human hope. That blend of absurdity and ache lingers long after the credits roll.
What I appreciated most about Volume 7 is that it refuses to tie anything neatly together. Like Tarkovsky, like Resnais, it isn’t interested in closure. It flickers like memory, repeats like history, and haunts like a dream you can’t shake. Watching it, I didn’t feel like I was consuming a story—I felt like I was being tested by one. It’s not an easy film, but it is a necessary one.
For me, Volume 7 is a challenge, a mirror, and a warning. It reminded me that the future we dread and the one we dream of might be the same thing, depending on where the loop finds us. And that’s why this is a film worth celebrating: it dares to confront the uncertainty head-on, leaving us with no easy answers, only the unsettling beauty of the questions themselves.
