Passenger/The Man Who Couldn't Leave - Perth Festival

Reviewed by Kate O'Sullivan

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As part of Perth Festival, BIOMASS turns WA Museum Boola Bardip’s Jubilee Hall into an immersive gallery. Showcasing some of the most ambitious virtual reality and interactive works from around the world, this is not novelty Virtual Reality (VR) — it’s a thoughtfully curated program that treats immersive media as a serious storytelling form.

On the session I attended, the experience was a double feature: Passenger (7 minutes) and The Man Who Couldn’t Leave (31 minutes). Together, they offered a powerful and surprisingly complementary meditation on migration, memory and belonging.

Passenger is a 360° stop-motion VR film that places the viewer in the back seat of a taxi, driven by a bird — a red-hooded plover — who also happens to be a migrant. As the guide to your silent protagonist, he narrates fragments of his own story while ferrying you through unfamiliar terrain toward a new home. The Australian landscape flashes by, but it quickly begins to blur the recognisable with the uncanny, detouring into dreamlike, fantastical spaces.

The effect is both disorienting and oddly tender. The creators cite The NeverEnding Story as a key influence, and that comparison feels apt. VR proves particularly well suited to recreating the experience of arrival in a new place, where everything feels both familiar and strange. Putting on the headset feels like stepping into another world.

What’s especially striking is that, despite the high-tech delivery, Passenger is rich with hand-made detail. The passing landscapes are clearly constructed from cardboard, felt and practical materials. In contrast to the weightlessness of computer-generated imagery, this tactile aesthetic gives the world a real sense of texture and physicality. The result is intimate and human, reinforcing the emotional core of the migration story rather than overwhelming it.

The Man Who Couldn’t Leave shifts tone dramatically, stepping into the haunting memories of Taiwan’s White Terror era. Unfortunately, technical issues meant the VR headsets malfunctioned during this screening, and the film could not be experienced in full VR-360 as intended, and had to be watched a mapped 2D version on the large front screen. Even so, the work was affecting.

Set within the former Green Island prison, political detainee A-Kuen recounts his imprisonment and persecution in the 1950s, sharing stories of resilience, sacrifice and survival. The work becomes a meditation on memory, justice and the urgency of preserving these histories. While subtitles in a VR environment are never a perfect solution, the film makes a strong effort to integrate them as seamlessly as they can be when they are hard coded into the footage as these are.

There is also a strong theatrical sensibility at play. The piece borrows as much from theatre as it does from traditional film, placing the viewer in the middle of reenactments and monologues rather than observing from a comfortable distance. Director Chen likens the experience to a dream, and that description feels apt: the work moves fluidly between memory, testimony and re-imagined space.

Together, these two works demonstrate the curatorial strength of BIOMASS. This is immersive storytelling with ambition, emotional weight and artistic rigour, exactly the kind of boundary-pushing work we expect from Perth Festival. Even with technical hiccups, the program makes a compelling case for VR as a powerful medium for contemporary storytelling.

Reviewer Note: Kate previously worked at the venue hosting this event. Tickets for this review were organised by Perth Festival.