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(Popcorn Frights Review) UNIVERSE 25 is a Cosmic Experiment in Faith, Failure, and Forgotten Stories

By. Professor Horror 

                                               

Popcorn Frights has always been a haven for strange hybrids because they seem to purposedly seek out the kind of films that won’t just test genre boundaries but cheerfully blur them into something unrecognizable. Richard Melkonian’s UNIVERSE 25 is one of those oddities. Watching it feels like stumbling across a dusty VHS from the late ’80s or early ’90s because it is the kind of film that shouldn’t exist in pristine condition but somehow does (as if unearthed from a dead archive). That uncanny “lost film” sensation isn’t just a nostalgic aesthetic here, but it’s part of the story’s DNA, a reflection of the way the film treats memory, meaning, and the fragile permanence of human connection. On the surface, UNIVERSE 25 follows Mott (Giacomo Gex), an angel sent by his distant Master (Andre Flynn) to complete three seemingly simple tasks before the next Sabbath: find a saint who doesn’t know he’s holy, sacrifice a lamb, and record his journey. These rules have the neat symmetry of biblical trials, fairy-tale quests, or good old-fashioned narrative structure. But Melkonian quickly destabilizes the neatness because each task is as ambiguous as it is literal and that ambiguity is where the film’s real fascination lies.

To understand why UNIVERSE 25 resonates, it helps to know the origin of its title. The phrase comes from John B. Calhoun’s infamous 1970s behavioral experiment, in which mice were given a perfect, resource-rich habitat with no predators. At first, the population boomed. Then came the collapse…social breakdown, violence, withdrawal, and eventual extinction. Calhoun called it “behavioral sink,” a cautionary tale about abundance without meaning. UNIVERSE 25 never mentions the experiment outright, but it vibrates through the film like an unspoken prophecy. Mott’s mission (framed as a divine errand) could just as easily be read as an observational study in a dying enclosure: Earth itself. That subtext transforms Mott from a savior figure into something more complicated: a cosmic anthropologist dropped into a closed system to see what humans do when left to their own devices. The “saint” he’s tasked with finding, Andrei (Dan Sociu), is hardly saintly because he is a choreographer with a failed crypto career, a failing marriage, and a wandering eye. In the Universe 25 model, morality is less a divine gift than a survival trait, one that erodes under the weight of self-interest. Mott’s pursuit of sainthood becomes less about divine recognition and more about testing if grace can exist in a system trending toward collapse.

                                         

This reading also reframes the three tasks. In folklore, “rule of three” structures give stories rhythm and inevitability. In UNIVERSE 25, they feel like an experimenter’s checklist because it is an arbitrary milestones to gauge a subject’s adaptability rather than moral worth. Finding the saint? That’s identifying a variable. Sacrificing the lamb? Testing the cost of loyalty or belief. Recording the journey? That’s data collection is not for Mott’s enlightenment, but for whoever sent him. That last task, “record your journey,” links to the film’s most debated device: the Dead Letters frame story. Between scenes of Mott’s quest, we cut to an anonymous employee in a postal dead letter office, sifting through undeliverable mail. He stumbles across Mott’s writings (the “record” of the quest) and starts reading.

These moments are short, but jarring because they feel disconnected from the main narrative until you consider their thematic role. Dead letters are communications that never reached their destination. They’re the physical embodiment of forgotten stories, lost intentions, or messages whose meaning is forever suspended. In the Universe 25 analogy, they’re artifacts left behind after collapse, scraps for a future reader to puzzle over without context. By framing Mott’s journey as one of these dead letters, Melkonian invites us to think about how stories survive (or don’t) when civilizations fail. Maybe Mott’s mission doesn’t prevent the end of the world. Maybe it doesn’t even change anyone’s fate. But the record remains, like a bottle tossed into a rising tide. Someone, somewhere, might read it.

                                             

Visually, UNIVERSE 25  leans into this sense of dislocation and salvage. Shot to look like pre-digital indie cinema, the grainy textures and patient camera work evoke a time when filmmakers had to make choices sparingly. The effect is more than aesthetic nostalgia because it gives the film the quality of a recovered document, something made before the collapse and stumbled upon later. Watching it feels a little like being that dead letter clerk: you know you’re handling something from another context, you’re just not sure what all of it means, and the performances deepen that ambiguity. Gex plays Mott with an initial coldness that slowly softens, not through grand gestures but through accumulation, a shift in body language, a moment of hesitation before following an order, a flicker of recognition in his eyes when he sees something human worth keeping. His interactions are observational at first, as though he’s categorizing behaviors. But by the time he faces the choice of finishing his mission or following his own path, the detachment is gone. Whether Mott is divine, alien, AI, or something else entirely, he’s caught the behavioral “infection” of humanity…longing, doubt, and attachment. Even the film’s stranger flourishes, like the abrupt musical interlude, make sense within this framework. In the middle of an experiment, they’re the unpredictable spikes in data or moments where human behavior defies categorization. It’s easy to see why some viewers find these tonal shifts baffling. But in a world modeled after Universe 25, chaos isn’t just inevitable, it’s the point.

Not all of Melkonian’s choices land. The Dead Letters subplot, while thematically rich, will feel extraneous to anyone who wants a tighter narrative. And the film’s refusal to clarify its metaphysics (is Mott’s Master a god, a programmer, or something else?) might frustrate those who prefer their allegories spelled out. But these rough edges feel appropriate for a work that’s as much about what’s lost in translation as what’s found. Ultimately, UNIVERSE 25  is less a traditional story than a cinematic artifact of an experiment we’re all still living through. It’s a film about systems in decline, about how meaning survives (if it survives) when communication breaks down and the rules no longer serve their original purpose. Like the dead letter clerk, we may never know if we’re reading the full story or just the scraps that made it through. But the act of reading, watching, and trying to make sense of it might be the most human thing left. It won’t be for everyone. Some will see a muddled religious allegory or an indulgent surrealist puzzle. But for those tuned into its frequency, UNIVERSE 25  is a haunting echo of an experiment still running, with no guaranteed outcome. In other words: welcome to the enclosure.