This article redefines the “essay film as criticism” by asking whether the essay film can still function as a critical cinematic form distinct from dominant image-production regimes in the age of digital globalization and late-capitalist media. First, it revisits Hans Richter and Noël Burch to outline the emergence of thought-images that go beyond factual depiction toward intellectual substance, as well as the notion of the essay film as a practice of negation within the framework of political modernism. It then engages with the arguments of Seo Dongjin, Erika Balsom, Hito Steyerl, and Thomas Elsaesser to show how contemporary essay films risk reproducing capitalist image economies when they remain at the level of self-reflexive subjectivity and fragmentary associative montage. Building on these debates, the article turns to Jean-Pierre Gorin’s writings to propose a relational subject of the essay film that is formed through encounters with heterogeneous objects, rather than through external representational codes or a self-sufficient first-person “I.” In Gorin’s conception, the essay film’s critical force lies in a movement of grafting and becoming, which generates new relations instead of merely juxtaposing differences on a flat, horizontal surface. The article concludes that the thought image of the essay film should be understood not as indeterminacy or anti-narrativity per se, but as a practice that simultaneously dismantles dominant visual codes and the isolated ego, thereby creating relational images that open onto other modes of realism and critique.