Zeros and Ones (2021)

Zeros and Ones is the kind of nocturnal fever dream only Abel Ferrara would dare to stage: a war-thriller that moves like a whispered prayer through a Rome of shuttered streets, hard shadows, and mounting dread. Ethan Hawke throws himself into the film with a committed, searching intensity, anchoring the confusion and urgency as the camera prowls and pivots with restless, street-level immediacy. The pleasure here isn’t tidy plot mechanics so much as atmosphere and momentum—the sense of being hunted by ideas as much as by people—until the city itself feels like a pressure cooker. It’s unconventional and sometimes deliberately disorienting, so if you need clean answers and straight lines it may not be your ride, but if you’re open to a bold, idiosyncratic thriller that plays like a late-night transmission, it’s hard to shake.

Zeros and Ones is clearly aiming for a paranoid, nocturnal fever dream of modern warfare and terrorism, with Rome and the Vatican used more as mood than as a straightforward setting. The problem is it plays like a puzzle with missing pieces: the narrative is scrambled, the pacing often drifts, and the film keeps reaching for big, profound statements without earning them in a coherent way. If you want a clean, tense thriller with clear stakes and momentum, this will likely feel like a frustrating slog rather than a gripping race against time. That said, Ethan Hawke commits, and Ferrara can conjure an eerie, end-of-the-world atmosphere that might work for viewers who enjoy opaque, mood-first cinema and don’t mind leaving with more questions than answers.