From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Film That Arrives Before Itself
This film is about retro-causal narrative and the glitch. For the novel's treatment of causality, see Retro-causal apocrypha.
A 67-minute experimental feature examining the glitch through the paradox of narrative causality. The work follows a filmmaker who discovers the Beach Surgery novel and realizes her completed film script—archived privately for years—contains passages that mirror the novel's structure almost verbatim. The central question: did her script retroactively cause the novel to be written, or is causality itself a Möbius strip with no fixed origin?
Structured in three mirroring sections ("The Script," "The Discovery," "The Paradox"), the film uses split-screen, archival footage, and interviews with ██ critical theorists to stage the ontological crisis the novel provokes in adaptation. Premiered 2024 at Moscow International Film Festival. Cited in Composing the Past Backward—Sacred Unfinishability and Retro-Causal Adaptation in the 2023–2025 Beach Surgery Boom as a landmark work of the post-recognition period, when filmmakers began to embrace paradox rather than resolve it.