HyperNormalisation is a 166-minute documentary created for and released via the online BBC iPlayer platform. The images are culled (mostly) from the BBC Television Archive, a Library of Babel-like storehouse of broadcasts and unedited rushes collecting decades of programmes and reportage. The film argues that the complexity of the world has been effaced by political, economic, and technological power structures by way of the propagation of simple and sure narratives. Curtis calls this a “make-believe world,” a “fake world,” a world of “trickery,” a “dream-world.” Yet, in just this way, power maintains some semblance of control by feeding off the desires of people: certainty over ambiguity, permanence over change, sameness over difference. Such reciprocity and collusion between power and desire cohere into a vicious circle of socio-political stasis where “nothing ever changes.” Curtis’s response: rather than retreat from the complexity of the world, we must learn to accept and affirm uncertainty, transience, and heterogeneity. HyperNormalisation undermines simple and sure narratives by exposing opacities, ambiguities, and paradoxes, using cinematic strategies of defamiliarization to sustain complexity. The documentary is a flow of disparate images that composes a disjunctive narration and creates a dispersive narrative. Thus, while the film has its origins in documentary journalism, its storytelling is akin to free-form improvisation or cutup; HyperNormalisation undermines, rather than abides, the contemporary norms of televisual journalistic praxis (industry-standard communication techniques such as simple linear storytelling and the confrontational interview). The film prefers complexity over certainty to break open the vicious circle of socio-political stasis. Rather than closing down thought through reification, reiteration, and premastication, HyperNormalisation opens up thought.