That moment produces a wash of patient calm and humanity after 80 minutes of solid drama. ‘Upload’ contains elements of the darkly speculative series ‘Black Mirror’ and the relatively hopeful ‘Years and Years’, but the preoccupations are as timeless as the best genre fiction.
Not that “uploading” is completely fictitious. It is our future and present: an already expressed ambition to upload consciousness to a decentralized blockchain, preceded by the traces of ourselves we already post on the internet – our images and inner thoughts slowly build to what the clinic of “Upload” ( shot on the modernist Zonnestraal sanatorium in the Netherlands) would call a Mind File for our digital afterlife.
How that file comes about is detailed in filmed sequences starring Ashley Zukerman (“Succession”) as a stereotypical Silicon Valley type, overly enthusiastic and uninterested in waiting for government regulation, and Katja Herbers (“Evil”) , as an empathetic psychiatrist who also has a trace of hubris. The technology is only available to a privileged few, the kind of people who would fly into space recreationally. Or buy eternal life here at the cost of death – to avoid the complications, both ethical and environmental, of multiple uploads.
For these scenes, Van der Aa writes less of an operatic score and more of a soundtrack, uncomfortably but excited, with jittery strings, chaotic percussion and electronics distorting into crackling white noise – all played, with propelling momentum, by Ensemble Musikfabrik, under The Dedicated and Otto Tausk’s commanding baton. However, Van der Aa’s music takes on a different style for scenes featuring the work’s two singing roles: the unnamed father and daughter.
We meet them – the baritone Roderick Williams, delicate and always likeable, and the soprano Julia Bullock, silvery at the top of her range, equally at ease in pop direction and luscious lyricism – after he’s uploaded, without her knowledge. Their interactions have the naturally rhythmic vocal writing of Janacek or Debussy. When left alone, she is usually accompanied by more traditional sounds, such as piano or strings, while the father’s musical vocabulary is solid, irreversibly electronic.
