This docufiction is funny and pregnant with ideas – as a group of young artists on the spectrum examine how their creativity and sense of self is shaped by autism

Here is an engaging docufictional experiment, an investigation into autism co-created by a group of young artists on the spectrum called the Neurocultures Collective. The resulting film is ingenious, funny, intellectually curious – and pregnant with ideas. It is all about how autism shapes creativity and makes sense of the self, and it gives a new kind of access to the mysterious and the uncanny.

One of the group is shown hosting a B-movie cult film club and also drawing a storyboard for his planned shlock-horror animation about zombies in the American civil war, a fragment of which we will see later. Another is apparently in a doctor’s waiting room filling out a questionnaire designed to assess her possible autism, while a little girl opposite is reading a story about a border collie called Chess. (Another member of the group will later act out the part of Chess.) Having finished the questionnaire, she is asked by the doctor to watch videos while he tracks her eye movements; we then watch the same videos ourselves while onscreen graphics – red dots and lines – make jagged shapes across the action, in places where we maybe weren’t looking. Other participants demonstrate their own choreography of ritualistic and repetitive movements: a part of intuitive role-play.