Tunnel
Based on the short story

by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Gen 260

Is there, perhaps, anything

that can disrupt our inertia

and awaken within us once more the capacity to “see”

what we no longer have time to notice?

A student boards a train, as he does every day. This time, however, the train enters a tunnel with no end. As the darkness stretches on, his unease begins to grow. And yet, his fellow passengers remain unfazed, as though nothing at all were happening. Based on the allegorical short story by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, this adaptation follows that very passage into darkness, bound for an unknown destination. Or is there, in fact, no destination at all?

In the present day, human life unfolds under a state of sheer acceleration. Even as catastrophe, loss, and injustice take place all around us, we remain swept up in a motion already underway – resisting anything that might force us to stop and listen. Speed becomes a refuge; and within this ceaseless movement, we seem more than ever motionless and silent. In the face of this mute acceleration, the artist Panos Iliopoulos proposes a pause: “Perhaps it is enough to reacquaint ourselves with our own gaze, so that, like a whisper, that sensitivity may awaken within us – the one that once allowed us to feel truly human.”

As a short story, “The Tunnel” has joined the higher echelons of European literature between and after the wars – especially in its surreal and symbolic stretches. It is an absurd, parabolic narrative unfolding across multiple layers, in which resonate an unconscious drift toward catastrophe, social inertia, the paralysis of routine, a wilful blindness to reality, and a surrender to the mercy of dubious “conductors.” Within this brief yet densely packed existential drama, countless anxieties and questions find room to gather – like a carriage that can always take on more passengers as it spirals off to nowhere.