Videoheaven: Alex Ross Perry’s insightful examination of video shops

• Reviewed from the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam

“The video store is a place of hope and anxiety about the future,” Maya Hawke says, narrating Alex Ross Perry’s seven-part video essay. This opening is mega metatextual: onscreen is her father, Ethan Hawke, browsing the aisles of a video store as Hamlet in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film. Hawke contemplates Hamlet’s famous dilemma: “To be or not to be.” An inter-generational and incredibly well-researched film, Videoheaven is more than just a loving nostalgia trip, offering an insightful anthropological analysis of the use of the video rental store in an impressive range of, albeit mostly American, film and TV.

Charting the rise and fall of the (mostly) now defunct media and social space (a small number of video stores still operate world-wide, including the UK’s own 20th Century Flicks in Bristol), Perry digs into the values that underpinned and, ultimately, sank the once popular titans of home entertainment. What Perry lands on as the most significant factor is that video stores were a social mode of distribution: face-to-face, hand-to-hand, enmeshed with taste values. This, Perry argues, is what created the double-edged sword that made them simultaneously desirable and shameful spaces where a heightened mix of emotions played out.

While the film plays largely for a cinephile audience – there is enough niche knowledge of the placement of Troma film posters in the background of almost every trash film since The Toxic Avenger Part III (1989) to make your head spin – it also acts as an archive explainer for younger generations who won’t ever have set foot inside a video store. Nostalgia trips for Gen Xers are abundant with the additional pleasure of cringe-worthy clips from Blockbuster training videos and a nod to Betamax, while younger generations can enjoy the irony of Maya Hawke narrating her own appearance as a video store clerk in Stranger Things, a TV show made by and for the streaming platform commonly said to be responsible for sinking video stores: Netflix.

Tension in the film rises from the notion that video stores and their either nerdy or snooty clerks had the potential to open up a fantasy world as well as the ability to activate fears – which, according to Perry, is usually the idea of being caught renting pornography. A film clip joyride, Videoheaven only suffers at the poor quality of some of its archive content, never intended to be blown up for the big screen. However, as a 180-minute homage to an outdated analogue technology, its fate is far more likely to end on a streaming platform.