Collapse

Collapse (2009) is an American documentary by Chris Smith that you can watch online on iFILM. For eighty minutes the camera barely leaves a dim basement room where one man sits and talks: Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who reinvented himself as an independent reporter.

Chain-smoking through the interview, Ruppert lays out his vision of what comes next. Peak oil is behind us, he argues; an economy wired to cheap fuel is running out of it, and the energy crunch will drag food, finance and the environment down with it. Smith shoots the whole thing like an interrogation — short questions from off-screen, then long stretches where Ruppert is left to finish his thought. At moments he sounds like a prophet, at others like a man near the edge, and the film refuses to decide for you which one he is.

The director of American Movie builds the monologue so the tension keeps climbing with no cutaways and no musical cues to lean on. It's a hard, uneasy watch for anyone who likes talking-head documentaries and is ready to argue back. Stream Collapse (2009) online on iFILM.