Metacritic reviews

Stylistically, Ascension borrows from the city-symphony genre at times, with long stretches passing without any dialogue as the camera whips past and through recycling depots, cell phone assembly lines, and poultry plants. There are no talking heads in the picture or any camera-facing reflections to guide the audience along a narrative, making it less cinéma vérité and more direct cinema in style. It is an effective approach.

Presented with no narrative and limited structure, Ascension is a collection of breathtaking images and revelatory vignettes that position China as a simultaneously alien and completely universal cultural and industrial landscape, never spelling out which direction points toward progress.

Never appearing to judge any situation, Kingdon confidently allows the images to tell a fascinating, universal story of inequality and class division, revealing a country that feels more like a capitalist society than anyone’s idea of a Communist state.

Through her unfussy direction and sly editing, Kingdon’s collection of vignettes is a reminder that the destructively frenzied cycle of consumption and waste always trickles down.

Focusing her camera on the rising cogs in the machine of China’s insatiable consumer culture, Jessica Kingdon expands on her 2017 short “Commodity City” with the visually stunning feature Ascension.

Part of the film’s genius is in how the images are put together, sometimes to absurd effect, at other times unnervingly.

As engrossing as it’s alarming, the documentary flows with a stream of consciousness about the illusion of the “Chinese Dream.”

It empowers Chinese citizens while also shining a light on the exploitation and oppression they face in the workplace and job market.

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn’t exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.