You can bet that Adam Curtis was one of the few people unsurprised by Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election.
The British documentarian’s latest, HyperNormalisation, screening Saturday and Sunday at the Northwest Film Center, posits Trump as the culmination of a process 40 years in the making—one that has gradually eroded the sense of a shared public reality and shattered the notion that politics can be a force for change in the world. He also, judging from the films he’s made over the last 15 years, tends to expect the worst.
If the prospect of a nearly three-hour film about Trump feels like cinematic masochism (and it should), don’t worry: The man himself makes a cameo in the first 15 minutes, pops back up about halfway through, and only becomes a real focus in the final half-hour.