Fantasia 2017: Animals

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Have you ever walked into one room driven by a distinct purpose only once you get there find that purpose as dissipated as smoke? Is this old age or is it brain damage, or is it old age or is it brain damage? What's the word for sheep? Where am I?

Animals, a surrealist marital yarn from Polish filmmaker Greg Zglinski screening at the Fantasia International Film Festival this month, , tells the story of Nick (Philipp Hochmair) and his wife Anna (a deliciously uncertain Birgit Minichmayr) and his lover and their upstairs neighbor and the apartment-sitter and the ice cream sales-lady (all played by Mona Petri), and the birds and the mountains, and the road between here and there, and the way that some doorways open into rooms other than the ones we were just standing inside of. It's origin is Escher, and its origin shows, both upside down and forwards.

We know that Anna is writing a book about a woman killing her husband, and that Anna stands over her husband with a knife sometimes, sometimes when he's not standing over her with a pillow. She follows Nick to town where he has sex with the woman who killed herself, and then he skins the sheep they hit while she watches, and then the upstairs neighbor or is that the apartment sitter has sex with the man who lost his finger... but that hasn't happened yet. The finger, not the sex. The sex has happened. Does happen. Is happening? And what does the Hitchcockian storm of sparrows have to do with it?

The story, you see, sometimes it turns. Sometimes it swerves straight into traffic. Sometimes it dances on great big bovine tiptoes. Animals is The Tenant gone wilding - it's the Aussie Animal Attack movie Long Weekend, but taxidermied. It's a weird stuffed and sleek creature, thirteen arms and eyeballs, man. It's a horse of a different color, and they're serving horse-meat here.
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Previously from Fantasia:

Game of Death reviewed here

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