In “The extent of heaven” there are a total of 11 characters and a flock of vultures that will grow in time. In the first part of the film we will see four characters (three men and a woman, of ages between 30 and 55) who hold a huge economic power and regularly meet to take decisions involving ruin and misery for millions of human beings. Besides, as a pasttime, they indulge themselves in experiments with anonymous people, whom they abandon in inhospitable or isolated places with hopes of seeing them die or kill each other.
In the second part of the film we see six anonymous people experiencing situations that equate to a vital shipwreck, to their failure as people integrated in this society: a 55 year old worker who refuses to quit his work post and is kicked out by force, a young girl who finds this same worker, half-conscious, and tries to help him, an 12 year old teenager called Lur (earth) who suffers her basketball teammates’ bullying and takes refuge in her personal diary, a 35 year old poet who goes through an unhappy love affair, a girl who escapes from a religious school of decaying morals, another girl whom her parents kick out of home. After this vital shipwreck, there is an explicit one in the film: five of these characters swim their way to the coast of a huge desert. We ignore if they were travelling on a ship and it had an accident. What is clear from now on is that they have failed as members of the “system” and have been thrown into a desert that echoes their social isolation and their inability to adapt to the rhythm imposed by the times. And their lack of adaptability has nothing to do with their age: in the group there are teenagers as well as very mature people. The determining factor for this failure is their spirits’ tenacity not to surrender. As for the 12 year old teenager, we see her experience horror inside of a religious building by means of a subversion of the imagery, that seem to sugest an inversion of the tale of “Alice in Wonderland”, by Carrol.
In the third and last part we see these six anonymous people wandering across the great desert in different directions, while a priest walks from one to the other demanding alms or any valuables. The fact that the priest does not consider the photo camera one of the girls carries (which she uses to record the steps of her weird journey) as a valuable is symptomatic. In the end, all the shipwrecked gather on a stone hill to wait for nightfall, and light a fire to keep themselves warm. The priest shows up and demands the diary where Lur keeps all of her secrets. Lur is seized by doubt, and finally decides to throw the diary into the fire. A great flock of vultures flies in circles over their heads.
