Original subtitles

He found me.

They know what we've done. They don't like it.

Oh shit.

Oh fuck!

This is it, Harper. The rest is down to you.

Finish it.

Why do I follow him... Fallon.

Was it a backlash to my catholic schooling?

The morbidity of faith?

Or maybe I just wanted to make something good, for once?

My pact with the Devil.

Why are you here? In film class?

I want to make...films?

You wanna make the best film ever made.

You're in theology and control engineering. I study computer science.

So, why are you in film class?

Can a work of art be so precise in design and execution..

that it can inspire the viewer to see God?

How do you mean 'God'?

Imagine you're a medieval pilgrim.

Sleeping in the gutter, hallucinating due to malnutrition.

At the end of your journey, you gaze up

see sunlight reflected through the glass

of the Sainte-Chapelle windows.

You think it was chance, these designs. You think they were

accidents of the imagination.

No, there's technique, maths, geometry.

Back then, mixing science and religion could get you killed.

These guys, they knew more than they could show.

In the 1400's a leather trader,

Karim Nisbah, spent 12 days in the desert. His camel died,

the sun burned his red face, but after dragging himself home

all he could say to his wife was 'I've seen God'.

In 1937, a german marine scientist was hypnotized by this

wave of bioluminescence on Lake Karachay.

His first words upon revival? 'I've seen God'.

And the connection is?

Hypno-induced temporal lobe epilepsy.

And there's a direct link between the optical nerve

and the region of the brain responsible for religious devotion.

You're saying images can induce visions of God?

That's why I joined your film class.

I want you to document the experiment.

But we know that white noise and binaural beat stimulate the brain.

And the visual cortex responds to symmetry.

Some patterns work better than others so we altered them

using various parameters: scale, color, position.

Which worked best?

Well, we tested them, one at a time, measuring the results on the EEG.

Are you recording?

Hundreds of people work on this.

Across the globe. It's called Haynault's pattern theory.

They're looking for a perfect image?

It could take forever to find. That's what you do?

No. I work for Stratton,

a tech firm. We build HIDs; mice, keyboards...

and this prototype. It scans brain activity.

I do software for this thing, and last month...

this happened.

It gave me an idea; if the scanner

could give feedback on the standard binaural switch,

what could it do for pattern theory?

It is a simple script: is X stimulated?

If no, deviate. If yes, mirror and split.

Repeat. No? deviate. Yes: mirror and split.

Mirror and split, mirror and split.

Can you control it, the patterns and the...?

No, it feeds from the subconscious.

So you're testing it on yourself? Incredible.

That's not all, check the readout you get

when you watch this thing back.

Shit. You found it. Haynault's pattern.

And so the work began.

Ellen White, founder of the Seventh-Day Adventists

suffered brain injury at age 9, had frequent seizures.

Spoke directly with God. She was epileptic.

So was Dostoyevsky. Do you know what he called it?

The ecstatic aura.

You're saying the entire history of religious prophecies

is linked to brain malfunction?

Ten thousand years of fanatical belief.

God isn't a bearded man sat in the clouds, or a four armed elephant?

It is a bug. A glitch. A neurological construct.

We worked through the night... longer hours. Fallon never slept.

Fallon?

Have you told anyone? About the experiment.

What? -I was followed, last night. And then again this morning.

By who, the police? -The Church.

You think they'd like it? Wouldn't fucking like it.

Wouldn't like what? -If we found it. Found what?

The shortcut to God.

At first I thought it was a joke.

We named his apparitions the religious authorities,

but I didn't believe him.

It couldn't be true.

Perhaps you should cut the self-testing?

You could do serious damage. Migraines, seizures, hallucinations.

Who else is there?

No. -It's perfectly safe.

Says the paranoid schizophrenic.

I'm not paranoid.

Prove it. -I can't... But you can.

So the experiment took a turn.

It didn't take long to finish the sequence.

Join the dots.

We named it the Brain Hack.

But there was still one problem...

Dammit! -What? It happened again.

Some kind of reflex, a safety catch. Look.

The Brain Hack starts at 4:22, at 4:28 the velocity increases.

It's working, but then~ But then?

Three seconds in, a kind of defense mechanism.

Maybe the brain is trying to tell us something.

How would you like to be lobotomized?

It's just the pre-frontal lobe, I could scoop it right out.

Then Fallon disappeared.

Two days. No word, no warning.

What if the visions were real?

If you open the door to God, maybe you let the Devil in too?

Hello?

Well? -Sit down.

You're not gonna need that.

Now we found a pattern that will work every time.

Like Haynault predicted?

A universal method of using. And the defense mechanism?

We know how to beat it.

What are you doing?! Fallon! ...Shit.

No... no!

That's right, let the adrenaline come.

Fear is how you beat the defense mechanism.

Flooding the cerebellum with fear.

If you don't want to see the results, look away now.

Well?

Did you see anything? Tell me.

Nothing? I don't understand.

It doesn't work, Fallon. But the reaction was incredible!

You should've seen it. Seen what, God?

Fuck you.

It took 20 minutes. But then it happened.

The poet Valery once wrote:

"The universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which

is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect."

He was right. And it's beautiful.

Fallon? Fallon!

He found me.

This is it, Harper. The rest is down to you.

Finish it.

Are we doing the right thing? What do you mean?

We could be... fucking our brains. No.

The brain evolved to do this, it's a natural function.

A natural function? -Yeah. It's just... most people never get that.

Modern life, how it is. We're not touching the hardware.

Just hacking the software.

Giving it a cheat code for the final level. God mode.

You wanna talk moral implications?

We're not the ones asking for money, devotion, preaching hate...

and telling people that they're sinful, teaching them to maim and kill.

We're showing them the truth.

Then you mean this is free?

The 'closest to God' isn't just for monks and priests,

self-proclaimed prophets.

It's personal. Within us. Every one of us.

Brain hack needs to go public. On the internet, festivals, TV.

If everyone had seen what we'd seen...

We could end wars.

I once asked why you were in film class. Well now you know.

We're making a short film; half documentary, half dramatic fiction.

We may need to embellish the story.

Just enough to get the audience on the edge of their seat.

Get the adrenaline pumping. Beat the defense mechanism.

Because at the end of the film,

we show the Brain Hack. Live and uncut.

It's untested, unsafe. Are they ready for it?

They have to be.

If you don't want to see the results...

look away now.