Slamdance Review: The Bitcoin Car: The Hills Are Alive With the Glow of Crypto

Movie info via Slamdance:

THE BITCOIN CAR is a musical adventure in which a young goat farmer on a small coastal village finds herself on collision course with the megalomaniac death wish of a young crypto investor. After her brother comes home for the summer, she has to explain that she’s partially responsible for the gold plated bitcoin mining facility located on top of the cemetery where their parents are buried because she accepted a lot of money in order to pimp out – and gold plate – her old Toyota. However, now unexplained natural disturbances have begun to occur. When her baby goat Klamydia is found dead and turned completely white, the siblings team up with an electrician and a priest to find out what’s going on inside the crypto mine before everyone is put in danger.

Review:

The Bitcoin Car is a polyglot musical (it’s sung in Norwegian, English, Finnish and a little bit of Latin for liturgical glow) about the environmental damage caused by crypto-mining. Think of it as an absurd version of The Sound of Music with an 18 year old blood cancer virginal billionaire (Zoe Winter-Hansen) as the villain and a singing goat herd-stress (Sunniva Birkeland Johansen), with four goats named after assorted sexually transmitted diseases, plus a model looks younger brother (Henrik Paus) as the Von Trapps trying to live organically, sustainably among the Norwegian mountains. There are also golden singing and dancing electrons who function as a Greek chorus of sorts.

The Bitcoin Car works fantastically well as a silent film, even the musical bits , because my wife and I can sing along to songs of my own music using their subtitled lyrics as a form of Karaoke event. The virtual screening I watched had a soundtrack glitch that made The Bitcoin Car a totally silent film after the fist fifteen minutes. I think it rather improved the film.

The Bitcon Coin Car uses the musical form and its absurd narrative to not so subtly drive home the fact that big corporations are willfully creating climate change in the name of pure capitalistic greed. Here, the villain has a somewhat noble but still selfish motive that allows the director (Trygve Luktvasslimo) to use the old dying child idea as a way to satirize religion and the idea of heaven. Let’s just say that heaven isn’t quite what it’s built up to be.

Counterbalancing all this are subtle grief notes which give The Bitcoin Car a bracing poignancy. The crypto mine is built over the community graveyard. The sell out solution that the community took became the source of their wealth. So there is both guilt and penitence occurring simultaneously- a psychological and emotional conflict that is never fully resolved. Absurdly living with grief is the best accommodation the characters can find. Death Unites Us is the title of one of the songs.

The Bitcoin Car gets a 3.5 out of 5 or a B+. It’s streaming as part of Slamdance 2024 which is part of the Slamdance Channel. The virtual part of the festival runs from January 22-28.