After the Shell Turns a Near-Death Experience Into VR

After the Shell (original title Le Grand Silence) is a 14-minute monoscopic 360-degree film by the French artist Pierre Moulin, in its world premiere in the XR Competition of the Kaohsiung Film Festival. It screens in the festival's 360 Cinema at VR FILM LAB through Monday.

The viewer plays a drifting soul. The film opens in a decaying room where only an unmade bed remains, crosses a snow-covered city whose towers dissolve into the sky, and ends in a tunnel of mycelium where nature reawakens. Moulin based it on a near-death experience. A voice-over by Axelle Stiefel works as an inner consciousness rather than a narrator, over sound design by Octave Magescas. Robin Moncho handled VR support, Alizée Petit the graphic design, and Diversion distributes.

The film also feeds Moulin's ASSETS series, which pulls fragments out of virtual worlds and casts them in plant-based resin. The newest piece, shown on Instagram earlier this month, compresses the whole film into one object, from the bed to the mycelium.

Moulin works across VR, sculpture and games. The Host (2026) is a game about a fungal intelligence that takes over a digital environment, and Aggregate, made with Distraction Collective, combined a game with 3D-printed resin, projection and sound and premiered at CPH:DOX. Diversion, the film's distributor, showed the first of those in a purpose-built game tower for its 10th anniversary in Paris.