192 Explosions and Counting: 'The Exploding Girl VR' Review

Review by Suzie Toumeh

SHORT REVIEW VERSION

⭐ Rating

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4/5)

✅ Pros

• ✔ Makes comments about modern media feeds without saying a word. Horror monsters, anime and game characters all running together towards one person for no reason... exactly like scrolling at 2am.
• ✔ Your head position will move to new places. One second you're positioned next to the bed, next second your eyes (and head) are on the floor level.

❌ Cons

• ✖ In an intense piece, you are just a visitor. A piece about bodies, but yours is only meant to sit it out.
• ✖ Extremely intense and at times overwhelming

Trigger Warnings from Reviewer?

body horror, explosions, explicit sexual content (with surreal meshes), animal death, themes of sickness and familial separation.

Age Recommendation from Reviewer?

18+

Reviewer recommends it for…

Viewers interested in bold VR storytelling and affective design.

Technicality

Seated VR film experience. ~19 mins

📖 Plot Summary

Candice has exploded 192 times in the last three months. In this seated VR piece, you are a witness inside her fractured daily reality. Intimate moments in her small bedroom including a heartbreaking phone call to the child she misses collide with surreal chaos including graphic explosions, sex with gaming avatars, a destructive tsunami, and a final, prolonged looping death of a glitchy dog stuck in a fence. Through it all, Candice’s tired voice reveals the feeling of falling apart every single day.

📖 In This Review

1 The Experience's Core 2 The Journey 3 Direction 4 World-Building 5 Sound 6 Conclusion

1. The Core of the Experience

Have you ever been so tired that you felt like your body might just fly apart? Like if one more thing happens, you will simply explode? That emotional precipice is the doorway into Exploding Girl VR, an immersive experience from French filmmakers Poggi & Vinel that premiered at Cannes and screened at IDFA DocLab in the Netherlands. On the surface, its surreal avatars and sudden detonations function as a sharp critique of 2AM doomscrolling and internet culture. But above all else, this piece tells the story of a world that expects you to reassemble yourself every single morning after exploding the night before. It is also about the quiet agony of an unanswered phone call, of missing a child so deeply that your body cannot hold its shape, and how those fragile human moments weigh more than all the digital tsunamis and chaotic noise surrounding you. 

Can an experience that deliberately bombards your senses give you a deeper connection to the daily modern struggle to survive? 

2. The Journey & Agency

You enter this as a misplaced observer. Your perspective is locked into awkward, vulnerable positions: on the floorlevel, placed on the other side of a chopping block, or facing a blank wall that makes looking around semi-pointless. Candice possesses zero agency over her own fractured body, her heart hangs exposed outside her ribs, a bionic leg replaces her limbs, and a painted smile masks her face. Appropriately, the experience grants you no agency either. It strips away the comforting illusion that we are always in control. 

 

3. Directing & Design

Where other VR pieces might reward visual exploration with some hidden reward, this piece confines the viewer mostly to Candice’s cramped bedroom, your gaze meets dead ends in every direction: left is a wall, right is a wall, and behind you offers no relief. Without warning, the pieces executes jarring cuts that teleport your head across space: from the chair to the floor, to beneath a chopping block, and then underwater amid flying debris. Candice is sick, disoriented, and detached from her own frame; your body is made to feel that exact bodily disquiet. By placing your camera inches from her huge face when the experince starts, they force you to confront her painted-on grin. When the final sequence loops with a dying digital dog in a fence, you cannot look away, not because you are physically chained, but because the design has systematically trained you that there is no refuge behind you. 

 

4. World-Building: 

The environment of Exploding Girl VR is constructed from isolated spatial islands: you are abruptly dropped from a cramped bedroom to city crossroads, a beach, a disco, a café, and an empty field containing a dying dog. There are no transitional corridors or gentle fades; you are simply here, and then instantly there. This spatial fragmentation mirrors the interior logic of trauma and depression, where emotional states rupture without a connective "how." Populating these environments is a mismatched junkyard of digital assets, monsters pulled from disparate video games, a Grand Theft Auto V NPC running aimlessly, and a glitching dog mesh. This surreal, low-fidelity asset logic functions as a direct reflection of our contemporary media landscape: the rapid, surreal friction of scrolling past a catastrophe, an ad, a recipe, and a meme in a matter of seconds. Amidst this chaotic visual noise, Candice remains the sole constant anchor, her presistant voice over serving as the only element holding this reality together.

 

5. On Sound

Grace Seri’s French vocal performance as Candice provides the sole anchor in an otherwise chaotic auditory landscape. Her delivery is hollowed-out and thoroughly exhausted. As your perspective is teleported across space, her voice remains steady in your ears: following you through violent detonations. Explosions detonate while glancing at subtitles forces you to lag slightly behind her emotional cadence. When Candice’s narration abruptly ceases as a dog reaches a fence in the last scene, the resulting silence becomes far louder than any explosion, leaving you isolated in the headset awaiting the next rupture.

 

6. Conclusion: What Stays After? The "Body Memory"

Once the headset comes off and the visual noise clears, what lingers is the quietest element of the entire work: the aching voice of a mother missing her child, that tired, flat phone call into the void. That central core remains disarmingly simple: a human frame failing to hold itself together while attempting to reach someone who doesn't answer. Exploding Girl VR reminds us that beneath the chaotic feeds and sensory overload of modern existence lies a quiet imperative to witness one another's pain. 

 

Reviewer: Suzie Toumeh

Suzie holds two Master’s degrees: in Media Studies from Utrecht University and English Studies from the University of Szeged. She has served on two film festival juries, including the prestigious European University Film Award.

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