The film’s title refers to the luxury rating aspired to by Songdo City, a super-modern metropolis in South Korea. Sonja Lindén’s Five Star Existence is a comprehensive and stimulating exploration of technology’s role in the human condition and vice-versa. By turns illuminating, complex, and troubling, much like the technological advances under scrutiny, the film poses salient questions, both practical and philosophical, all the while suffusing the screen with an exquisitely photographed assembly of vignettes. Whether you find yourself dependent on, wary of, or awestruck by technology and its place in society, Five Star Existence will simultaneously support and subvert expectation.  TM