The
title is reasonably honest, since there is at least one cat and several sheep
in this film. However, the talking cat will incite murderous thoughts, while
the sheep need better shepherds because at least one or possible two of them
will be mowed down by speeding cars. Or something like that. Reality is a
slippery eel to nail down in Greg Zglinski’s Animals (trailer
here), which
screens tonight during Cinepocalypse 2017 in Chicago.
Anna
and Nick are quite the power couple (he is a celebrity chef, she is a children’s
book author), but their marriage is still on the rocks. They have planned a
sixth month retreat in the Swiss countryside, but it gets off to a rocky start when
Anna discovers their flat-sitter Mischa is the spitting image of Andrea, the
upstairs neighbor she suspects Nick has been conducting an affair with, which
indeed he has. Things really start getting strange after Anna bangs her head in
a supposedly minor auto accident (admittedly, the sheep gets the worst of it,
by any standard of measurement). Her dreams seem to flow into Nicks, and vice
versa.
As
Anna convalesces in their cabin, she starts to experience lost time and
feelings of paranoia. Yes, the cat also communicates with her, telepathically.
What really makes her suspicious is the local ice cream shop woman’s resemblance
to Andrea and Mischa. At this point, the film really starts playing games with
our perception of on-screen reality.
One
of the reasons Animals is so
effective is that Zglinski takes the time to establish his characters and their
circumstances before lighting off on a Lynchian bender. In fact, when he
finally starts pulling the carpet out from under us, it is especially shocking
because of the rhythms he allows Nick and Anna to settle into. Yet, the film
soon becomes thoroughly disorienting, because we are never given signals as to
whose reality we should trust.
Animals is darkly surreal,
but it also has a healthily mordant sense of humor. Sadly, it makes you wonder
what might have been, had Austrian filmmaker Jörg Kalt not committed suicide
after completing the first draft of the screenplay in 2007, shortly after wrapping
the little-seen (at least in North America) Crash Test Dummies. In the intervening time, Zglinski polished the script to a
high gloss and executed it with remarkable fluidity. Indeed, his big
mind-twists unfold unusually smoothly. Yet, for those in the know, the film’s
several references to suicide are coldly jarring.
Birgit
Minichmayr falls to pieces pretty spectacularly as Anna, while Mona Petri’s
Mischa and Andrea are quite the emotional basket cases. As the relatively
stable Nick, Philipp Hochmair really anchors the film and helps set-up the
craziness of his co-stars.
Granted,
Animals never really comes together
at the end, but these sorts of films rarely do. To Zglinski and Kalt’s credit,
it also happens to be smarter and more stylish than its mind-bending fellow
lost highway travelers. Highly recommended, Animals
screens this afternoon (11/9), as part of this year’s Cinepocalypse.
