Fantasia Film Festival 2024 ‘Animalia Paradoxa’ Review – Swim Against the Apocalypse
Chilean filmmaker Niles Atallah produced the 2018 stop-motion animated film The Wolf House, which I reviewed here. The general themes of uneasiness and dread wrapped in this massive unsettling atmosphere must have made an impression on Atallah because his third full-length feature film, Animalia Paradoxa, has a similar unnerving ambiance.
The world has ended. It doesn’t matter how or when but these dilapidated shambles and these ash-ridden ruins are all that remain. Humans are extinct and time seems to stand still. Scavengers have inherited the earth.
In a reality full of burnt rubble, those unfortunate enough to survive rummage through garbage. A rag-covered creature wearing a gas mask searches daily for whatever water or liquid she can find to take something that has become sacred in these times; a bath.
Despite the death of the world, Animalia Paradoxa is an experimental fantasy about what life still stirs and what it can eventually become.
Niles Atallah foregoes typical linear storytelling for a film with minimal dialogue, utilizes old stock footage of bomb explosions and jellyfish, and incorporates marionette puppets into its finale. Much of the film is about this nameless creature (Andrea Gomez) roaming a gray wasteland with fantastically unnatural movements. She is called to the sea when she lives in a reality seemingly devoid of one.
The creature not only searches for water every day but also treasures. It takes trinkets to a clawed hand that emerges from a hole in a wall and trades them for what appears to be a single gummy worm. She takes this gummy worm to an individual who has long black hair that covers their entire body from head to toe.
Water drips from their black hair, which the creature collects and then pours into a shallow box-shaped bathtub. She then rolls around in the liquid until she falls asleep where her sole reward is lucid jellyfish dreams.
The actors in the film have to be contortionists since they bend backward, coil their bodies into pretzel-like stances, and crawl on the ground in the most difficult ways imaginable. During one of the creature’s outings, she finds herself in a dusty two-story building.
Random creepy figures lurk in the doorways as figures stretch and contort on nearly transparent dirty sheets. You can’t quite ever fully decipher what’s going on under these sheets, but it’s as if they’re trapped inside of a cocoon or are about to emerge from a long slumber.
This is the type of film that is going to divide audiences. If you’re a fan of cinema that lays everything out for you and needs little explanation, then Animalia Paradoxa isn’t for you. There’s some story here, but it mostly rides on being visual nightmare fuel. It’s mesmerizing with how haunting its imagery is and yet ambitious in the sense that it could mean everything and nothing.
The creature in the film has some amphibian attributes that result in unusual dancing sequences. Everyone is alone in this reality – as bartering with someone typically results in something valuable being taken away or destroyed.
It feels like Niles Atallah was attempting to find beauty in a world of ugliness. Shiny and pretty things are still valuable and there’s a general theme of resurrection. Animalia Paradoxa dives into a sea of consciousness and is ethereal like a dream, but it cautiously swims around the remaining nightmares of a rotten world.
Ominous, divisive, and unapologetically weird, Animalia Paradoxa is a uniquely fascinating fantasy with unforgettable imagery. It blends genres in a way that is truly special.
Animalia Paradoxa (2024)
PROS
- So bizarrely great.
- Unlike anything else.
- Creepy and brilliant.
- Does so much with so little.
CONS
- Not a conventional film.
- You have to search for the narrative.
- Won't be for everyone.
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