Phenomena isn’t like any other film I’ve seen. It’s a documentary, but its filmmaker, Josef Gatti, doesn’t venture out into the world. He doesn’t visit a famous place or photograph wild animals or interview anyone. Instead, he conducts science experiments in his house.

These experiments aren’t undertaken with the intention of discovering something new; rather, he uses bubbles, dust, light and other objects to microscopically replicate forces of nature, including energy, entropy, waves and nuclear.

Some of it is interesting, offering miniature models that allow us to better understand the hidden phenomena that govern the universe. Much of it is very beautiful; there are extended sequences of bubbles bobbing on water, explosions of coloured dust, intricate waves forming in water and pollen, which are hard to describe in their wondrousness, especially because they’re completely real. Gatti prides himself on the authenticity of every image in the film; he tells us that there is no use of CGI or AI anywhere in Phenomena.

The music adds to the sense of pulsating energy and fragile tension that Gatti seeks to evoke; original electronic music by Nils Frahm and Ryan Lee West has an electrifying, sharpening effect on the images the film is composed of, elevating them from isolated shots to film. Marketed as a ‘psychedelic odyssey into the fabric of the universe’, it is the score that gives Phenomena its surrealist dimension.

Gatti’s narration is often perceptive, making observations about the phenomena he’s observing which link it to the universe and sometimes even to human life. Commenting on one experiment, he notes that ‘order sprouts out of chaos’ when the conditions are right. At another point, talking about energy, he observes that, because energy transforms but doesn’t die, ‘nothing stays the same, but nothing really ever disappears.’ These kinds of remarks were one of my favourite parts of the film, with Gatti drawing realisations out of these microscopic science experiments that could be applied to various aspects of our individual lives.

I think I was drawn to these comments because they almost created a sense of narrative; they made the film feel more important, to me, by turning natural phenomena into metaphors for human life. I would have liked to see more comments like this, or a sense of narrative created in some other way; there were times throughout the film where I felt that it lacked direction. I started to find the film repetitive a few sections in, because although the phenomena were visually different in each one, the structure was the same; images with the same music, and the occasional voice-over observation. This is perhaps a consequence of the fact that the film is a compilation of individual segments that were originally produced as shorts for ABC television—as a result, the film lacks a narrative thread or a sense of evolution throughout.

Nonetheless, each section alone makes for a stunning watch. One of my favourite sequences depicts bubbles’ structures changing over time; when they’re first blown, their surfaces display distinct coloured bands, which gradually merge into one another, forming new colours – pink, green and blue turn to yellow, black and white – while dotted, wavy patterns form across their surfaces. The construction of the sequence is masterfully done; Gatti cuts rapidly from bubble to bubble, perfectly matching the transitions between images to the music. It’s genuinely mesmerising.

There is also a metafictional dimension to this sequence, and others. We first see Gatti set up the camera to film the bubble, followed by the initial shots from his camera, before the microscopic, more artistic shots.

In this sense, it’s not just a film about natural phenomena, but about the capturing of that phenomena; natural beauty filtered through human eyes. As much as the film allows the images to speak for themselves, I was aware, throughout, that Phenomena exists because a human found these parts of the natural world profound and beautiful, and chose to display them in striking ways. There is a sense of wonder transferred from filmmaker to viewer, and also a link drawn between Gatti, the universe, and us; a sense of interconnectedness where the phenomena Gatti reveals to us resonate with our own lives in unexpected forms. We are left with his parting realisation that ‘the unlikely story of the universe, and our own, is the same.’

Phenomena is a part of the 2026 Sydney Film Festival, running from 3-14 June. Tickets are on sale now at sff.org.au