Genre Differentiation

“Why This Isn't Just 'Psychological'”

Auntrolye is not a psychological thriller, nor a surrealist descent into madness. 

These comparisons, while common, reveal a surface-level misreading of the genre’s structural core. Psychological thrillers often simulate instability, placing the viewer in a state of suspense about what is real and what is imagined. They use unreliable narration as a device, a trick of limited perspective meant to confuse and later clarify. Surrealist cinema, in contrast, seeks to fragment narrative coherence entirely, embracing the irrational or abstract without requiring internal narrative accountability. Auntrolye does neither.

Where psychological thrillers invite viewers to question the protagonist’s experience, Auntrolye removes that possibility entirely. There is no objective world being hidden from the viewer, because there is no objective world at all. The film’s reality is not warped, it is defined by the protagonist’s emotional perception. The world is not distorted, it is correct, according to the governing identity at its center. This is a fundamental shift: the internal becomes external without contradiction. What the character feels, believes, represses, or recalls is not a suggestion of deeper mystery, it is the governing logic of the film’s space, time, and causality.

There are no revelations that pull the viewer out of the character’s view. There is no moment of narrative correction, no “truth” that is revealed to stand in contrast with the character’s understanding. Auntrolye’s structure denies the use of objective resolution as a safety net. Instead, it says: this is their world, and their world is law.

Auntrolye does not ask the viewer, “Is this happening?” It says: “It is happening because the character experiences it.” The viewer’s task is not to untangle delusion from fact, but to trace the emotional root of perception itself. What governs change in Auntrolye is not plot mechanics but identity shifts. It is not that the character’s mind affects the story, it is the story.

Thus, Auntrolye doesn’t operate in the realm of twist, doubt, or revelation. It operates in functional embodiment. The narrative doesn’t hide meaning beneath the surface, it makes meaning the structure itself. This elevates the genre beyond psychology as a theme. Auntrolye is not about the exploration of mind, it is about the mechanical translation of mind into world.

That is why Auntrolye cannot be categorized under the psychological thriller, mystery, or surrealist umbrella. Those genres may flirt with altered states or character breakdowns, but they ultimately depend on a stable reality to be distorted. Auntrolye abolishes that dependency. It builds the world from within the subject, and never leaves.