Egghead Republic is a multifaceted film about many things. Possibly, a bit too much.
Egghead Republic
a film written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 4–14, 2025.
Speculative art often has a way of being quite . . . lacklustre. The ground mandatory to cover is substantial compared to works of realism, as the necessity of expository world-building weighs on the plotline like a ball to a prisoner’s chain. The prisoner waits for release, the moment at which they may remove their shackles and run free with themself; so too does speculative art await its shackled release, when it may finally take itself up as something more than its exposition and run forward into its own experimental domain. Where speculative art is at its most lustrous, then, is at the precise moment when its expository world-building, and the experimental domain it explores, congeal to become something spectacular.
What is spectacular is always a spectacle—and to no coincidence, the speculative entrails. But at times, what is a spectacle cannot be called spectacular, for it carries the speculative pride of severe contemplation, yet fails to deliver dramatic beauty. The ground of the speculative is met, but the experimental domain it attempts to reach does not deliver. Rather than congealing, the speculative remains separate parts that either form a lacklustre, incohesive whole, or never fully harmonise. More than anything, confusion strikes.
All these specs—spectacle, the spectacular, and the speculative—provide insight into the nature of sight, originating from the Latin verb specere for ‘to look’, where the viewer is brought to observe something. If successful, they find themself incapable of turning away.
Bob Singleton, the great novelist in Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Egghead Republic, alone understands this. For the publication of his seminal novel, Horny Youth, Singleton received 23 murder attempts; and in honour of his exceptionalism, particularly for his novel, The Quiet Donna, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature. His aphorism, “Exceptional art requires an exceptional frame of mind,” rings throughout the film, begging us to piece together the speculative world-building and experimental domain into a cohesive, spectacular whole.
Yet we turn around and question what we ought to coalesce at every moment.
Sonja (Ella Rae Rappaport), an up-and-coming illustrative intern at the Kalamazoo Herald, embarks on a “gonzo journalist expedition” with her editor-in-chief, Dino (Tyler Labine); the Herald’s established cinematographer, Turan (Arvin Kananian); and a cinematographic intern, Gemma (Emma Creed), whom Dino sexually exploits. Fear not, however! as Dino makes clear to Sonja, who is under the influence of any number of drugs and alcohol, that he never has sexual relations with staff. Together, in violently intoxicated states, they embark into the ‘forbidden’ Zone: a nuclear radioactive Kazakhstan, accidentally decimated by a Cold War that never ended, in hopes of discovering—and at times inventing—nail-biting journalism. They would very much like to see a mutated centaur. (At the very least, we’re glad to see that even in a ruined world, Sonja and Gemma, the Herald’s unpaid interns, remain very much unpaid.) The satire of ’00s-era gonzo journalism, particularly that of Vice’s Gavin McInnes, is obvious and forms one of the clearest themes throughout the film.
Other themes, however, are quite scattered. Together, the Soviet Union and the United States instated IRAS, the Institute of Radioactive Art and Science (where Singleton resides). They’ve invited the Herald’s team to Kazakhstan because of Sonja. She is the IRAS’s pièce de résistance, as the great-niece of Singleton’s inspiration, Arno Schmidt, whose novel, Die Gelehrtenrepublik (The Egghead Republic [1957]), Kågerman and Lilja’s film adapts.
The question of genius and art, which Singleton and the film itself propagate by utilising a myriad of mesmeric sequences—including Sonja as a Greco-Roman warrior, as Pippi Longstocking, and Sonja lighting a match to discover the Ich (I) “that sees clearly” in the darkness—forms another theme that lends itself to the speculative genre of the film. But for a film so concerned with creating spectacles (and indeed, the spectacle of ridiculous humour might be one of its strongest), it never quite lands on the spectacular. A cohesive whole, a particular vision, is never quite clear. That IRAS is a homonym for iris is not lost on the film’s viewer, but perhaps feels a little premature for a film that, with a little more development, could have successfully jumped into its experimental domain.