Ascension, the extraordinarily confident feature-length debut of documentarian Jessica Kingdon, manages the seemingly impossible feat of being, all the same time, a thrilling formal object transforming the stuff of real life into abstract visual art; a very angry diatribe about the the human cost of industrialisation in modern China; and a patiently curious, hands-off observation of humans going about their work. I have, perhaps, ordered these three things by how much they are interesting priorities for me, personally, but part of the great achievement of the film is that it is all three of these things - maybe not all three of these things, all of the time (it is more formalist at the beginning and end, a quiet observational documentary mostly in the middle), but it at least does not sacrifice one of these things for the others. I would say that it's sort of like if Koyaanisqatsi was direct cinema, but it's not exactly that. It's more like it's phase-shifting between Koyaanisqatsi and direct cinema throughout, fluidly and seamlessly and always at just exactly the right moments.

At any rate, it would be awfully difficult to talk about the film without making the "it's like if Koyaanisqatsi did X" comparison at some point; I'm not sure if Kingdon was exactly thinking about Godfrey Reggio's 1982 experimental documentary, but composer Dan Deacon is unapologetically doing his best Philip Glass impersonation. And it is, by all means, quite a good Philip Glass impersonation altogether, but there's "inspired by Glass's brand of minimalism" and there's "flat-out stealing bits of 'The Grid' and using them in a near-identical context". It's still one of the best film scores of 2021, so there's that.

Ascension opens with a brief quote from a poem (and takes its title from the same poem), by Kingdon's own great-grandfather no less, speaking to the desire to rise above the problems in one's life, only to find that the more greatness one achieves, the more worry one finds. And that's as good a summation of the film's argument as you could hope to find. It presents Chinese industry as a buzzing hive of progress and productivity, a culture that is terribly proud and happy to be on an apparently irreversible course to take over as the world's foremost superpower after having been what they call a "developing nation" hardly a generation ago; and it presents this shift as one that takes an immeasurable toll on the lives of Chinese workers, forcing them to resign themselves to an ever-increasing race to be the most robotically perfect producers imaginable.

The film isn't hiding this even a tiny bit: it opens with a montage showing the constant bombardment of merry, you-can-do-it! propaganda that visually and audibly attacks people at every turn, streaming out from digital readouts, plastered on flat surfaces, piped in from speakers that seem omnipresent while also being invisible - this also sets up a motif whereby we aren't shown the mouths from which the human voices we hear emanate, while the talking that does happen onscreen is keep off the soundtrack. This eventually goes away (and then comes back), but while it lasts, it creates a strong sense of the disassociation from their own humanity that's required of workers who largely serve as the fuel for a devouring furnace of Mass Production. They are voiceless in the most literal way. Kingdon's career to this point has been built on some wonderful shorts attacking the soullessness of mass-produced consumerism, and Ascension is in part an extension of this. but it uses its larger canvas to go deeper: it's a film about how China has, through bad luck or malice, managed to develop an economy combining the very worst parts of capitalism and the very worst parts of communism (but it also never feels like it's "About China" so much as it uses China as a convenient emblem of what 21st Century living is doing to all the rest of us as well). Its title echoes in the specific way all of that propaganda is deployed in the greater culture, selling an idea of ongoing process that will, through the cheerful sacrifice of self today, manifest as a bolder and better tomorrow. An ascended future, we might say, if we wanted to get a little too intoxicated by the film's title.

Heavy stuff, and Ascension never pretends otherwise, but what makes this a gripping film to watch, rather than a tedious grind of clucking about the problems, is how Kingdon and her collaborators (foremost among them Nathan Truesdell, who was co-cinematographer with her, and is credited as "additional editor" - Kingdon being the main one) visually dramatise this. And so we go back to Koyaanisqatsi, which after all was looking at very similar concerns in the West rather than the East: how automation turns people into little tiny inhuman slivers of industrial processes. That film was rather a great deal less dogmatic in its arguments than Ascension, and was combining more astonishing images with better music, but at a point, one must acknowledge that we're not exactly swimming in Koyaanisqatsi clones, and since this is an excellent, excellent application of that film's compositional strategies to related (but different!) ends, best not to use that as a stick for beating up on Kingdon. Who is, to be quite clear, creating some of the most extraordinary images of industrial processes of any filmmaker in decades. It is easy to despair of living in an era when so many filmmakers seem to have grown afraid of using moving images to carry emotions and meaning, and documentary filmmakers perhaps the most afraid of them all; in such a context something like Ascension comes along like a big slug of whiskey, bracing and overwhelming and immediately intoxicating. There's something pompous and swaggering in the grandeur of Kingdon's imagery, depicting large-scale mechanical process in both impossibly wide shots and detailed looks at just this or that single element of a huge moving system.

And then, always timed perfectly to pull the viewer back from taking this all as simply a great bit of sensory overload, abstract images and abstract music swirling together to create a pure art object, Ascension will cut in to look at the actual humans involved. Here, the same rhythms that feel so remotely beautiful elsewhere begin to feel ominous and crushing. There are moments where Ascension achieves something of the effect of a horror movie, in its depiction of the inhuman qualities of endless productivity: one of its most vivid sequences, with the film slowing down and silencing its music to make sure we "get it" finds a team assembling sex dolls: painting on nipples, carving out slots between the artificial labia, and taking empty-eyed faces and screwing them onto the metal holes of the neck. It's dreamy and terrifying, as good a symbol of the end-of-humanity nature of all the consumer goods we see getting churned out throughout the film.

Kingdon isn't always above making a glib gesture: for example, we see someone stitching a "Keep America Great" pattern onto a shirt. And I get it - if I'm cutting the film, I probably include that footage too, it's just too snarky to pass up - but where the rest of the film feels like it's dancing around, jabbing us with needles as it puts its themes across, this is more like swing a big, heavy broadsword. And I do think the film slows down a bit too much as it full enters direct cinema mode in the middle, watching people in boardrooms meet. Look, I'm a big fan of boardroom cinema! But Ascension seemed to be doing something different till that point, and it rather badly compromises the forward momentum of a film for which momentum is all-important. Still, anything bad I have to say about the film is strictly a quibble. This is a beautiful film, and a troubling film, and a film that diagnoses the problems of the "always be more productive" ethos at the heart of so much of the modern global economy as well as I've seen it done in a long time.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.