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In total four kids die during the course of Permanent Green Light (2018), Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s second feature film as writer and director, which premiered at Rotterdam International Film Festival in January  The protagonist, Roman, is a French teenager planning his own spectacular suicide His preparation is concerned with finding the right mode to die, as if he were choosing the perfect filter for a selfie It can’t be too clichéd, too obvious, or too normal   Roman, is on the cusp of maturity – his hair is fluffy and his friends still have acne – and he spends most of his time in his bedroom re-watching explosion scenes with the volume turned to full, troubling his sister in the room next door As part of the planning process, he arranges to meet León, a calm but intense teenager who collects suicide vests ‘If only I could think of a reason’, she confides in him, days before she kills herself by jumping off a building Like León, Roman doesn’t have a reason either, but says he doesn’t need one His perspective brings to mind the writing of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, whose 2015 book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide looks at spectacular suicide and murder-suicide as an ‘answer’ to the alienation and anxiety-inducing competition of capitalism   Permanent Green Light is indebted to Robert Bresson’s The Devil Probably (1977), which follows the trials of Charles, a young Parisian disillusioned after the student protests of 1968, as he defeats attempts by his friends, therapists and activists to dissuade him from suicide At first I didn’t realise the connection – perhaps I’d been distracted by the beauty of Cooper and Farley’s ripe young actors, caught in a love circle around an unreachable protagonist as he works out how to explode perfectly without leaving a trace – but it’s an obvious precursor   Throughout the film, Roman becomes a symbol of his friends’ unmet desire for him, resisting each of their attempts at closeness Some of the best lines land as he casually dismisses human intimacy (‘…you seem like you love me Which is nice but kind of weird’)