Imagine if Werner Herzog had directed and narrated Free Guy. Instead of Ryan Reynolds’ hilarious antics as he looks handsome while trying to find meaning, love and friendship in a vibrant open world, he’s instead left tragically self-aware of his own nightmarish Sisyphean loop. He knows what he’s doing, but he can’t stop doing it; a puppet with algorithmic OCD, who’s only able to break free in fleeting moments of lucid humanity when that algorithm glitches.

That’s the premise of art collective Total Refusal’s latest mini-documentary Hardly Working. It’s grim and heavy and a real downer. And it’s awesome. Their team followed several non-playable characters (NPCs) in the game Red Dead Redemption 2 over the course of days; treating them as they would any subject in a documentary by trying to understand their world and their purpose in it. What they discovered was that, buried in the endlessly looping patterns of these background characters’ drudgery, were touching moments of personality. When the algorithm became inconsistent, so too did the NPCs’ behavior. A carpenter breaks free of his routine of hammering nails and stares directly at the camera as a storm approaches. A street sweeper finds a brief moment of respite and leans against a wall when her broom glitches out of existence. Humanity is found in the cracks of the game. Hardly Working is grand in both its design and its ambition.

Yes, it’s all filmed in-game, but this isn’t some lo-fi, amateur screen record. The cinematography is breathtaking. The narration is just over-the-top enough that it softens the fact your heart is breaking for the plight of pixels instead of people.

The result is something so bleak and so beautiful that you can’t look away. I remember the first time I heard the word ‘sonder’ and its meaning. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.