Zeros and Ones

The very first thing you see in Zeros and Ones isn’t a character or a setting, but Ethan Hawke himself, sitting in a dimly lit room, looking straight into the lens. He’s not in character; he’s just Ethan, the actor, giving us a three-minute preamble about how much he loves director Abel Ferrara and how challenging it was to film a movie in the middle of a global lockdown. It’s an incredibly strange, meta-theatrical way to start a narrative feature, and it sets the tone for the next 85 minutes: this isn't a "movie" in the traditional sense. It’s a transmission from a world that feels like it’s glitching out in real-time.

I watched this while my neighbor was power-washing their driveway, and the rhythmic, abrasive drone of the water hitting the pavement actually synced up perfectly with Joe Delia’s industrial, grinding score. It was one of those rare moments where the outside world and the art on the screen shook hands in a way that made me feel like I was losing my mind, which is exactly the headspace Ferrara wants you in.

The Beauty of Digital Grime

If you go into Zeros and Ones expecting a tight, Tom Clancy-style political thriller about stopping a bomb at the Vatican, you are going to be profoundly disappointed. While that is technically the plot—Ethan Hawke plays JJ, an American soldier navigating a darkened, pandemic-stricken Rome to find his revolutionary twin brother, Justin (also played by Hawke) and stop a terrorist attack—the "plot" is really just a clothesline for Ferrara to hang his anxieties on.

The real star here is the cinematography by Sean Price Williams. If you’ve seen Good Time or The Sweet East, you know Williams loves a textured, lived-in look. Here, he pushes digital cameras to their absolute breaking point. The movie is dark—not "prestige TV" dark where you can still see everything perfectly, but "I think my TV is actually dying" dark. It’s grainy, pixelated, and full of digital artifacts. The blacks aren't deep; they are noisy and vibrating. It creates this oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere that perfectly captures that 2021 feeling of being trapped in a world that only exists through screens and shadows.

The Dual Hawkes and the Art of the Vibe

Ethan Hawke is currently in the "I’ll try anything once" phase of his career, and we are all the better for it. As JJ, he’s a stoic, mask-wearing cipher, moving through the streets of Rome like a ghost. As Justin, he’s a wild-eyed, philosophical radical, delivering monologues about the end of the world while chained to a radiator. Hawke manages to make these two very different energies feel like parts of the same fractured soul.

The supporting cast, including Ferrara’s wife Cristina Chiriac and Valerio Mastandrea, feel less like characters and more like encounters in a video game that hasn't finished loading. They pop out of the shadows, exchange cryptic dialogue about "the end of the war" or "the Russians," and then vanish. It’s a movie that prioritizes "vibe" over "vantage point." It’s about the paranoia of the digital age, where everyone is a soldier, everyone is a spy, and the only thing we know for sure is that the Vatican looks terrifying when it's illuminated by a single flickering LED.

A Snapshot of a Broken Moment

Why did this movie vanish so quickly after its 2021 release? It’s a "pandemic film" in the truest sense. Most directors used the lockdown to make quiet, two-person dramas in a single house. Ferrara, ever the rebel, decided to take a skeleton crew into the empty streets of Rome to film a war movie where the enemy is invisible. It’s a work of pure "Contemporary Cinema" that doesn't benefit from a theatrical release; it feels like something you should find on a discarded thumb drive in a rainy alleyway.

There isn’t a lot of behind-the-scenes info available because the production was essentially a guerrilla operation. They shot for about 20 days with a tiny budget, often just running and gunning through the streets before the police or the curfew could catch up to them. This frantic, "get it while you can" energy is baked into every frame. It’s a messy, often confusing piece of work, but it’s one of the few films from this era that actually looks and feels like what living through 2021 felt like: a confusing, low-resolution nightmare where we were all just waiting for the next disaster to download.

Zeros and Ones isn’t a masterpiece, and it’s certainly not for everyone. It’s a jagged, experimental mood piece that asks for a lot of patience and a high tolerance for digital noise. But if you’re a fan of Abel Ferrara’s particular brand of Catholic guilt and urban decay, or if you just want to see Ethan Hawke give 110% to a movie that most people will never see, it’s worth the trip into the dark. It’s a fascinating, ugly, and strangely poetic document of a world that felt like it was ending, even if it turned out we were just waiting for the reboot.