Review: Centrifugal Fever – A Descent into Arco’s 108 spin

Review: Centrifugal Fever – A Descent into Arco’s 108 spin

Publication: The Framebreaker Quarterly Critic: Elias Thorne Date: December 12, 2025

VERDICT: ★★★★

Centrifugal force is defined as the apparent force that draws a rotating body away from the center of rotation. It is the feeling of being flung outward. But 108 spin, the new 5-minute structuralist work by the Iowa-based artist arco, achieves the exact opposite effect. It pulls you inward, dragging you down into the throat of a commercial washer/dryer until the centrifugal force becomes a gravitational one.

To call 108 spin a "movie" is a category error. It is a fever.

Shot on a handheld iPhone 11 in high-contrast monochrome, the film documents a single, unbroken cycle of a laundromat dryer. There are no actors. There is no dialogue. There is only the machine, the rotation, and a soundscape that borders on the hallucinogenic.

The audio is the true protagonist here. A rhythmic, breathy chant of "Heat... Bless... Heat..." layers over the industrial drone, turning the mechanical process into something biological. The "Heat" is not just thermal; it is the friction of existence. As the rotation speeds up, the viewer is forced to confront the sheer, grinding reality of the loop.

This is where Arco shows his hand as a student of Zen structuralism. A lesser director would have cut away. They would have given us a wide shot, or a narrative break. Arco refuses. He holds the shot. He forces us to stare at the tumbling laundry until the visual data degrades into pure texture.

In doing so, the film articulates a terrifying but liberating truth: Nothing is ever finished. The laundry is not being "done"; it is simply being maintained. The cycle of dirty-to-clean-to-dirty is infinite. By trapping us inside the drum, the film suggests that we are not the user of the machine—we are the laundry. We are the ones tumbling in the dark, waiting for the cycle to end, only to realize that the spinning is the point.

The film’s climax—a sudden, jarring shift into hyper-saturation—does not feel like an escape, but a revelation. The noise becomes music. The gray steel becomes vibrant. It is a visual representation of the Zen concept that Samsara (the cycle of suffering) and Nirvana (liberation) are one and the same.

108 spin is not an easy watch. It is abrasive, loud, and dizzying. But in an era of polished, frictionless content, this film has the courage to grind. It asks you to sit in the heat until you learn to bless the fire.