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Η Δίκη (The Trial)

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"The gate was always there, and it was made for you."

I have been carrying that sentence around since Wednesday night. It comes near the end of The Trial, Kafka's novel staged in Greek with Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos as the man on trial for something nobody will name, and he is phenomenal in it. So is everyone around him. But it is the sentence I left with.

The play is a man going through the motions inside a system that is slowly killing him. He asks what he is accused of, he tries to understand, he even tries to feel for the people doing it to him. More than once someone points at the exit. He does not take it. That is the part I cannot shake, because it is not that the door is locked. He is waiting for permission, and nobody in that system has the authority to give it, which is exactly how the system keeps him there: with the fear that something terrible happens if you stop waiting and walk.

Freedom inside a system that does not really allow it is a simple idea and a complicated one at the same time, and I think the complication is mostly ours. Nobody is watching the gate as closely as we are. Nobody cares about your life more than you do, and I do not mean that sadly. I mean it is yours, and you should.

I left full, heart and soul, and with one question I am still answering: which door have I been standing in front of, politely, waiting for someone to say now.

Go and see it. Then tell me yours.

If you cannot get to the play, the sentence lives in the book, in the short parable the priest tells near the end, "Before the Law". Kafka's The Trial is in the public domain, and that one page is worth the whole thing.

The Lighthouse

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What a visual masterpiece with a strong story, great actors and lots and lots of layers.

The story

Based on an unfinished story by Edgar Allan Poe this movie takes us along with two lighthouse keepers as they get dropped off at a small remote island with the lighthouse that will be the center of everything they'll do for the coming four weeks.

While they're there, we get to learn more about both of them than we probably would like to - and experience the quiet, the boring, the diffuclt inter-personal, the mythical and the force of nature.

There is also the plot line of someone drifting through life, looking for his own place, who let another man die, assuming his identity. The hallucinations are becoming more and more prominent throughout the story - unclear if that's due to the nature of the existence in someone else's shoes or due to substance abuse or the loneliness of the island life.

All of this in black and white. Beautifully composed, with audio that is sometimes loud or harsh and sometimes eerily quiet and isolating.

The visuals

The film is beautifully shot on Kodak Double X. I sometimes shoot a variation of this film for photography because it's so rich in contrast and sometimes a bit less predictable than others.

This, together with the brilliant set design and lighting choices, the film is not just great to look at, but it takes us into a long bygone era and the tall tales of the seafarers. It also mirrors well how repetitive, lonely and grueling the life on this forsaken place and this line of work are.

The symbolism

The obvious layer is the symbolism of the greek mythology (Thomas Wake invokes Triton, Neptune and is shown like Proteus at times) around the sea and the customs of seafarers (don't kill seagulls, they carry the souls of dead sailors).

A little less obvious is the theme of Howard longing for the light (fire) like Prometheus and overcoming the obstacles, sort of "stealing" the light from Howard - and ending up being punished for it.

You could assign Winslow the role of Sisyphus as well - he tell us all that he ever wanted was his one place. This picture becomes clearer when you consider that all the tedious, hard work he's got to do is ultimately temporary if not futile, plotted against the sheer force of nature they're subjected to. Also, again he is dealing with someone who keeps him from (literally and figuratively) ascending to the light without giving good reasons or a clear path towards his goals.

It visually clearly references a painting by Sascha Schneider ("Hypnosis") in a scene.

Then there's the symbolism of a toxic masculine relationship muddled up with a boy looking for a father figure - the dynamic between the two men is a turbulent one throughout the whole film. Also note both men share the same first name: Thomas. This is about identity in many ways.

Then there's the layer of psychology. Director Eggers explicitely mentions that there's a psychological angle and considering that there's admiration for C.G. Jung, I'd say the themes of guilt and murder (did either of the both men kill another man? Did they just "lose" the men instead?) as well as Jung's concept of the shadow (Wake mentions this at the beginning and we're seeing it throughout: Repressed parts become overpowering for both men) and the oedipal dynamics and power struggles between the men fit in here as well.

The rest

It's just a damn great film with stunning visuals, a well-built atmosphere and lots of angles and layers you can sink into.

Mulholland Drive

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mulholland Drive, what a visually beautiful, unorthodox and interesting story wrapped in a pile of horse shit.

In a BBC piece in 2025 it was praised as "the greatest film of the 21st century" and looking at the film poster, I was intrigued.

Spoiler warning

As I'm a bit frustrated with this film, I'll allow myself to refer to a bunch of story bits, including spoilers, in the rest of this review. If you want to see the film, go do it. Don't read further. Oterwise, join me in my expression of all sorts of emotions.

The story

The story, at its core, is great and unusual. It is also criticial of the movie industry and Hollywood, so it has a lot going for it! I also really liked the way it's set up - with dreams and non-linear narration it's definitely original and interesting. It also has a few different storylines of different characters happening separately and crossing over here and there.

But here comes one of the problems - these lines are sometimes only alluded to, sometimes they're not well embedded with the rest and inconsequential. Not only that, but some of the main storylines are chaotic and meandering, not really getting to the interesting parts or filling it with pointless but very-artsy-and-intellectual-sounding dialog. At the same time a lot of the dialog makes you go: "Wow, has the man who wrote this ever talked to an actual human woman?" - it just doesn't seem right.

The visuals

Visually the first thing that caught my eye is the neo-noir style and visual aesthetics. I really liked that. The lighting, the colorgrading, how light and shadow is used. The camera work in general is interesting and supports the story well. The softness and haziness adds to the dream scenes and the mystery the film portrays. Using stages in various scenes is adding to this immersion and fits the scenario really well, too.

Using color - the blue key, the blue box, the heavy blue neon and dark velvet tones in the Club Silencio - it's a very clever way to foreshadow things and tie the different storylines together. The scenes at Winkie's are also amazing, visually - the camera movements, the way we're put into a nightmare in full daylight and in a setting as harmless as a diner - wild. And yet, as we're about to learn later, this has been where Diane's downfall and her nightmare that we'll join the rest of the film, began.

The rest

The sound design is sometimes great (Club Silencio or the diner scene with the jump scare), but often the music seems misplaced, almost randomly chosen. To the point that it detracts from the rest. Some of the parts also seem like they're just padding - the part with the producer's cheating wife. The whole mob boss bits. Eh. Yes, they're intertwined with the other bits and they're referenced back later, but if you'd cut these parts, you'd almost lose nothing. Instead, you'd end up with a less diluted story, in my opinion.

In general, it feels like there's an interesting experimental story of dreams, intersecting, a drama of a love story that escalates into a hit job. Sitting beneath it is a critical look at Hollywood and its dark side. But it all gets muddled up, distracts itself and shrouds that in a thin veil of "this is art, you probably wouldn't understand".

Fine, maybe I'm not smart enough to get this, but I'd rather spend time with great film art, such as Metropolis, 2001: A Space Oddyssey or other beautiful works of the cinema history than this piece.

Bullet Train

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I saw the trailer, I wasn't sure if it's gonna be one of these films where the trailer has all the good stuff and the rest of the film is a boring bunch of nothing. Turns out - that's absolutely not what this film is.

It starts off relatively slow, like the train in the movie while it's pulling out of the first station, but gains speed throughout the film. I really liked that, as it allows the film to introduce a few characters to get things rolling.

At first I thought we're in for a relatively mindless action comedy with some hilarious characters involved, but I slowly realised that this is in fact a web of storylines, loosely interwoven. And again the film surprised me as throughout the film it becomes clear that this connection isn't as loose as it seemed.

Filled with beautiful cinematography, interesting characters and good storytelling, the film kept me entertained and surprised right until the end. Definitely a great watch!

In Jeff We Trust

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This short film tells the story of two women who joined a cult and are about to enter the "ascension" - but neither of them is sure, if they're really into this and truly buy into the cult around their leader and "god", Jeff.

The film features a few hilarious scenes from cult life, snappy dialog and a bunch of blood and violence. But what really caught my eye here is that it demonstrates a few things, we probably all felt to some degree in our lives.

Decision fatigue or fear of making the wrong decision. Looking for a place we belong. Feeling alienated by group dynamics spiraling outside of our comfort zone and the question if we should go along and see it as growth and improvemment or taking it as a sign to leave. Or have you ever wondered if you're the only one not getting something that everyone else around you seems to get? Wondering if they're faking it too?

This all culminates in a hilarious scene in a grocery store after they finally made a big decision to take control of their own lifes, only to be confronted with what they got them into the mess in the first place.

Quick, funny, but also an interesting reflection on adult life.

The Convincing Machine

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Gemini made this image for me. It convinced me, too!

AI is here and depending on who you're asking it'll solve the world's problems or kill all humanity. Quite the range! I've been looking at this through a lense that I'm not seeing mentioned often, I think, and I am quite flabbergasted by the ends of the before-mentioned range as well as by my fellow humans.

Where did this come from all of a sudden?

See, here's the thing: It didn't suddenly appear. LLMs, AI and machine-learning have a long tradition. Some of the current hype and debate are founded on "OMFG, look how QUICKLY we got here!" when in reality the first significant work (the perceptron) was conceived in 1957. It still is the foundation of ChatGPT and other systems today.

But there must have been a revolutionary development for it to explode so massively in the last few years right? Well, yes and no. A lot of amazing new hardware has been coming to the market, the realisation that we can use GPUs with their massively parallel computing architecture is fantastic to deal with the math that makes AI tick has sped things up, too.

Of course, also from a maths and computer science perspective, a lot of things have happened and been discovered, but the foundations have been here for a really long time.

For example: Researchers have recently found ways to tweak reinforcement learning a bit. But you know what? Reinforcement learning is a concept from Psychology in the 1910s, from maths in the 1950s and computer science in the late 70s with improvements in the 80s, 90s and throughout the years, including 2026. This is technology that is at least 57 years old (trial and error learning with an "internal monologue", John Andreae, 1969), depending on how you count.

The game changers were:

A lot of affordable hardware that could hold the amount of data needed and run the amount of calculations needed quickly
A vast amount of data ready to train the systems on (aka "the web")

In no way, shape or form is this a revolution that came out of nowhere.

What actually is it?

I'll start with two anecdotes. I once met a student who was really excited about what we were doing at the time with using machine learning to furnish apartments based on floorplans and some other inputs. After I explained what it is and how it worked, he looked me in the eye and said, disappointedly: "But that's just statistics". Yes, my friend, it is.

A coworker of mine - the incredibly smart and incredibly friendly Julien - once explained machine learning as "a program that produces increasingly good output the more data you feed it".

This is what I need y'all to understand. The AI we're seeing is data and maths. At a very basic level, we feed it data and judge its output on whatever criteria we have, then it takes that feedback and repeats the process, until the feedback gets good enough.

Don't get me wrong - this is amazing!

For decades, the way we made things with computers was programming. Programming required us to break down something we want into myriads of small, computable instructions and basically build out computer-executable rules bit by bit. Many things were easy that way - "Let me enter two numbers, then show the sum of these numbers" is easy enough to program. Another example could be:

Show a password input field and a button.
When the user taps the button, check if the password is exactly s3cr3t.
If it is, show the secret message.
If it isn't, show an error and repeat from the top.

This is great. We know exactly what this is going to output for every input. We can reason about it, we can debug it. If it's the right password, it'll show the message, if it's not, it won't.

Turns out, though: A lot of stuff is really hard to break into instructions like this. For example "Which hand-written number is in this photo?" is very difficult.

People have different writing styles, ink and paper may vary in color and brightness, contrast etc. That's where machine learning (and in turn, AI) shines.

We give it a lot of examples and tell it how wrong it is, until it's right often enough.

It will still sometimes get things wrong and the output isn't easily predictable for every possible input, but it helps a lot with a problem that isn't otherwise easy to solve with computers.

So these are our tools: Data and statistics, tuning things to be good enough but not having full control over the output.

Or we use programming, where it's really hard to express some problems so a computer can solve them, but we can be sure about the output for any input.

How do we interact and interpret what we're looking at here?

Now, this is where things get weird and difficult, I think.

If we look closely enough at what I mentioned in the previous section, we might spot something:

We give it a lot of examples and tell it how wrong it is, until it's right often enough.

What have we done with LLMs? We gave it a lot of examples of human language. Books, theater plays, movie scripts, lyrics and we've expanded this into music, videos and photos. We gave it pretty much nearly all our public data. And what have we measured? What was "wrong" and what was "right"?

Well, we gave it human requests like "Summarize this email" or "Create an executive briefing of the project, based on this project documentation" or, most likely, "create a photorealistic picture of a huge cat destroying a city as it hunts a laser beam coming from an alien UFO in the sky".

Yes, of course I had to. Convincing, innit?

We then looked at whatever the outcome was and said either: "wtf, no" (and maybe even elaborated on what was wrong, why and what we expected instead) or were excited about the result. We and our expectations became input as well.

Convincing us that we got a helpful, creative, great response is the output its optimising for.

We built a machine with the purpose of convincing us. A convincing machine.

That's its purpose - and because it's machine learning it gets better at it the more data (prompts, training data and our responses to its output) it gets.

This machine doesn't know the concept of reality, of truth or lie. It took inputs, produced outputs and then repeated this process with additional input: Our feedback.

Us being convinced and believing the output ~~was~~ is part of the input, of the training.

What to keep in mind

As humans, we tend to look for living beings, because they can possibly harm us. That's why things like Pareidolia (aka seeing faces in things) exists, for example.

Our thinking is also heavily shaped by our human perspective. We declare buildings evil based on their looks or their purpose. But a building can't be evil or friendly or empathetic. It's a building, dead stuff piled together in some way. That's it.

Yet, we build these machines with "personality" and say things like they "hallucinate" or "lie".

Why not call a calculator "smart", then? That's weird, right? It's just a tool that you hammer data into and get data out of.

Fun fact, though: That's what we're doing with AI as well, but we're giving it our own emotional responses as input and expect it to convince us as the output.

It scares me a lot to see how many people readily assign human characteristics to this tool and believe we're working on the same mechanics and principle that AI is. But how many kids do you know who learned to do maths by jelling lots and lots of numbers at them and then telling them how far off they were? Cause that's how AI learns.

This is all fun and games and, please, go ahead and enjoy the personality of your AI bot of choice! It's fun and it can help you get a lot of stuff done very quickly. I love how agents can deal with other chatbots for me (lol) and even deal with shitty websites for me, helping me to get more things down quicker.

But do not mistake the convincing machine for a human being.

Humans have morals, values, ideas, their own goals and emotions. They also sometimes have a bad day or values that don't align with yours. But we can hold each other accountable. The convincing machine will tell you - and everyone else - whatever it is, that is most convincing. That's not lying - because to lie, you have to consciously choose to deceive.

The machine doesn't do that, it just does what we built it to do.

Budapest

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I visited Budapest, I only thought of the one thing we came here for: Cave Diving!

My sister and I weren't certified, but the Molnar Janos Cave offers try-cave-diving where you can find out, if a cave certification might be for you... so we went! It was amazing and we got certified soon thereafter, coming again every few years to enjoy this beautiful place.

We had the opportunity to explore the beautiful underwater cave below Budapest. Here with my sister.

But as we sat outside of the cave, enjoying the pond with frogs and turtles, basking in the afternoon sun, I realised: Despite the rough shell, frowning faces and the hustle and bustle of the city around us, this was a nice place.

When we dive, we do so in the morning and finish up in the early afternoon. A great opportunity to explore the city for some food and general sightseeing.

Besides the famous view of the parliament building, we sat across the musical fountain on an island in the middle of the river, walked around the market with its dense collection of stalls and corridors, hung around the train station and walked through the old town.

We found lots of small shops, lovely people and great cafes and restaurants! While people often looked disinterested, annoyed or grumpy, most turned out to be friendly and helpful. What's even better is that my wife found her favorite tattoo-artist here and so we both enjoy going to Budapest for a couple of days together. I go dive, she gets inked, we enjoy the afternoons and evenings together.

Having been here a bunch of times now, I can safely say: The city grew on me and I do enjoy visiting very much!

Digger

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I saw the trailer for "Digger" as we were settling in to see Odyssey in the cinema earlier this year. It was quirky but it sure was fun, I thought.

When I saw it a second time, this time online while browsing around, I did not like it at all. It feels like a fever dream and it just suspiciously seems like one of the trailers that has all the good moments of the movie where the rest of the movie is boring.

However, seeing the responses from critics to the movie split between "great" and "terrible", I wanted to see for myself. So we went and settled into the smallest screening room of our local cinema, uh oh!

Look how tiny it is!

But what we saw, started out great, if a bit over-the-top satire, a farce really.

(Source: IMDB)

But this wasn't just a feverish farce, right from the get-go I noticed the artful way that composition and color was used.

And as the story progresses, getting more and more ridiculous - boom - a twist appears. So far, so good, we've seen that before. But something is off in this part, too. It's subtle at first, but it gets increasingly obvious and a third layer starts unfolding.

But, like Wes Anderson has done before, there's yet one more layer. It's very, very subtly hidden in the wild ride that is the first layer, very tentative in the second layer but pops open violently when the other layers collide spectacularly around the middle of the film.

Marvellous.

But what really stuck with me is the visual language.

(Source: IMDB)

It's consistently great and subtle, but supports the plot perfectly, carrying it's own layer, sort of.

All in all, not an easy movie, but an artfully made and told one.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I really liked this one. I read it during a busy, difficult time.

Becky Chambers builds a very interesting world, a glimpse into a big cosmos.

We start of in the confines of a space ship, seeing it through the eyes of someone who left their old life and their old self behind to start over. And as they start over, we both - the protagonist and the reader - figure out our way through this cosmos full of different species, new technology and old traditions and the reality of societies. I love how we're gently expanding this glimpse into politics, planets, factions and get sucked deeper and deeper into the dynamics of the ship's crew and the galactic diplomacy - without being overwhelmed or bored.

It's a very nice, cozy Sci-Fi story in a beautiful, diverse and interesting universe.

Chromata

Martin Splitt & Eva Mermingi — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A closed shutter in Athens with the word ΧΡΩΜΑΤΑ painted on it, and a painter holding a can of house paint. Since 1963. Black and white.

Athens, May 2026. Photo by Martin.

A paint shop, shutter down. On the shutter, in black, the word for colours. Next to it a painter, mid-stroke, a can in his hands. Since 1963, the sign says. And the photograph is black and white.

That's the whole picture. A wall that says colours, in an image that has none.

The eye goes to the word first, because it can read, and reading is faster than seeing. Then it goes looking for what the word promises and doesn't find it. Not on the shutter, not on the scooter, not on the cars parked in front. Everything the word describes has been taken out of the frame, and the word is still there, insisting.

We know the colour is real. That's the strange part. Nobody looks at this photograph and concludes the shop sells grey. The evidence is everywhere: a paint shop, a painter, a name that has meant colours for sixty years. The proof stands on its own, without the colour, and the mind fills it in without being asked.

And yet what the photograph shows is grey. Both are true. The colour is not less real for being absent. The grey is not less real for being chosen.

Because it was chosen. Black and white is not what happens when colour fails. It is a setting. You pick it when there is too much to look at and you need to see the shapes: where the light lands, where the edges are, what is holding the structure up. The colour is not gone, it's set aside, so that the form can be read. Nobody sorts a foundation in full colour.

CAMERA :: current settings mode ............ monochrome (manual) subject ......... colour (confirmed, see wall) reason .......... structure work in progress exposure ........ long. longer than planned note ............ this is a setting, not a fault

There are seasons that look exactly like this from the inside. Everything you know says there is colour ahead. The people around you have it, you have seen it on them. The signs are on the walls, in capital letters. And still the picture arrives in grey, day after day, because the work of the season is structural. Putting things where they go. Reading the lines. Holding the camera still for a long exposure, longer than anyone planned, in a room that has grown too small for the shot.

We tend to read the grey as a fault in the eyes. It is worth considering that it is the lens doing its job.

Some of the grey we mix ourselves. Some of it gets mixed beside us, by whoever stands close enough for their weather to become ours. It is hard to tell the two apart while you are in it. Grey with company stops looking like a setting and starts looking like the sky. Only from outside the frame does it become clear how much of it was indoors.

And the long exposure costs something. Anyone who has held still that long knows the particular tiredness of it: not sadness, not fear, just the arms. Wondering, somewhere around the third week, how much of this a person was ever built to hold. This many roles, this much arriving at once, at this speed, inside a system that keeps asking for more stillness and calls it living. The question doesn't have an answer in the frame. It has a shutter, and a year, and a man with a can.

Look at him once more. The shop is closed, not gone. The name is still up. The year is still up. And the painter is not looking at the wall, admiring anything. He is looking at the can, checking there is enough.

That is the honest posture of a grey season. Not looking at the colour yet. Counting it.

The shutter is down. The paint is inside. The sign has said colours since 1963.

Black and white, on purpose, for now. The colour was never the question. The settings were.