Scrolling further, you find Etsy listings selling “Van Gogh brushstroke replicas” used by the film’s animators. The category blurs. Is this a prop? A collectible? A relic? When you search for a film in “All Categories,” a movie ticket becomes a communion wafer. You realize that Loving Vincent wasn’t distributed; it was dispersed . Every frame is a unique original. The film itself is just the shadow cast by 65,000 separate canvases.
Here is what the search results reveal.
Toggle the filter to “Textbooks & Scholarly Articles.” You find PDFs from the Journal of Clinical Art Therapy and Film and Philosophy . The search query changes. People aren’t asking “How long is Loving Vincent?” They are asking “Can a painted brushstroke diagnose mental illness?”
You find a YouTube tutorial with 12 million views titled “How to paint like Loving Vincent in 20 minutes (fail better).” The comments are a confessional. “I ruined three canvases today. I think Vincent would understand.”
“Did Dr. Gachet really kill Van Gogh?” “Loving Vincent deleted scene: The gun theory.” “Why the film ignored the ‘sunstroke’ hypothesis.”
The subject of this particular deep dive is Loving Vincent (2017), the world’s first fully painted feature film. On the surface, it is a biographical drama about the death of Vincent van Gogh. But if you search for it across all categories —e-commerce, academia, DIY crafts, psychology forums, and auction houses—you discover that the film is not merely a movie. It is a ghost, a curriculum, and a dare.
And you realize, finally, that you weren’t searching for a movie. You were searching for permission. Have you ever searched for a film in "All Categories" and found something unexpected? Share your rabbit hole in the comments below.
Finally, you filter to “True Crime & Conspiracy.” Here, the film disappears and the man reappears. For every search for the movie, there are three searches for the myth.
The film’s thesis—that Van Gogh’s ear was a scream for connection, not just a symptom of madness—has spilled into university syllabi. In the “All Categories” search, you find a syllabus from NYU titled “Empathy Through Animation.” You find a Reddit thread in r/psychology where a therapist uses the film’s “flame-like cypresses” to explain emotional dysregulation to a teenager.
So you pick up a brush. You dip it in blue. You make your first stroke.
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