While ostensibly a documentary profile of a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a researcher of the naked mole rat, and a robot inventor, Errol Morris’s film is actually a brilliant essay on human consciousness. Listen as the words of one ‘expert’ start voicing over footage of another and watch as the camera’s shooting angles begin to skew and the film’s pace begins to race with faster edits and haphazard cuts. Out of control, indeed. Human consciousness, while researchable and malleable and replicable as per the film’s ‘experts’, is finite. That’s right, our obsessions with mastery and control are all futile attempts at cheating that which we cannot – mortality.This is heady stuff and all communicated in the film’s design. One more thing: Fast, Cheap is a masterpiece.– Dennis Sabourin