Beware of talking cats.
Do I tell you anything about Animals or do I allow you to discover it for yourself? Giving you enough reasons to convince you to watch it without taking the joy of discovery is the challenge of finding a movie like this one. Fortunately, I can’t come up with a description that will do any justice to it.
Nick (Philipp Hochmair) and Anna (Birgit Minichmayr) are going on holiday. Nick has been unfaithful, so they’re trying to get away from everything. Unfortunately, they end up hitting a sheep in the middle of the road. That’s the gist of it and yet I am telling you so little there.
There’s a door in Nick and Anna’s flat that is locked and can’t be opened. The woman that Nick was seeing, Andrea, has jumped out of a window. Her husband, Tarek (Medhi Nebbou), is in despair and knows about the affair. There’s a door in Nick and Anna’s holiday cabin that is locked and can’t be opened. Mischa (Mona Petri) is watching over Nick and Anna’s flat. Tarek thinks that Mischa is Andrea.
Director Greg Zglinski co-writes with Jörg Kalt and offers us a creation that is just twisted and a bit off in a delightful way. There’s so many little things to work out here that I feel like I’m fidgeting with an entire panel of buttons, levers, switches and toggles. The narrative seems to change as the movie goes along. It’s like a memory revisited in time that no longer remains the same.
This is kind of movie is really hard to make. It’s a slippery slope in which a misstep and you end up with a complete nonsense of a film. Play it too safe and you’re boring. Keeping this kind of movie afloat and having your audience engaged is walking on a tightrope on fire. And yet the movie makes it across without losing the thread.
Highly recommended, specially for fans of the unusual and unexplained. I will have to mention David Lynch here, because this is just up the same twisted alley. The caveat is that you’re only going to enjoy this movie if you’re willing to put up with the unusual and offbeat. The seemingly disconnected events do have a pattern underneath the surface. I’m going to have to do a more in-depth analysis of this movie later on.
That will do for now.
Never Think Impossible 