FANTASIA24 REVIEW: Animalia Paradoxa [2024]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 80 minutes
Release Date: December 5th, 2024 (Chile)
Studio: Storyboard Media
Director(s): Niles Atallah

The star of Niles Atallah’s Animalia Paradoxa yearns for the ocean. Despite her humanoid presence (Andrea Gomez), this amphibious creature is caught within a devastated world she cannot survive without a respirator covering her face. Her means towards making it another day is rummaging through the garbage-strewn structure where she resides for lost treasures that can be bartered with a creature we meet as a long-nailed hand exiting a hole in a wall. She passes it a token. It passes back a worm (gummy or real, I’m uncertain). That payment is then given to another—a woman hanging from a ceiling by thick black hair whose watery secretions provide our protagonist her only source of life.

How do we know this? Because we’re transported to the sea the moment she contorts her body into the tiny puddle it creates at the bottom of her bathtub. Is it a memory of which she wishes to return? A dream she aspires to find? All we know for certain is that the water rejuvenates her. Only when she discovers a flowing faucet to fill her plastic jugs do we see the potential laid to waste by this dry and dusty existence. Finally, she can shed her rags and mask to soak in the liquid and let her skin sparkle once more. Rather than seek to help her, however, the other humanoid creatures (land animals) jealously look to destroy.

And that’s the extent of the narrative as we see it on-screen. Atallah’s experimental mixed media piece is a lot more than its surface visuals, though, if you’re willing to dive in and consider the montaged tragedies at the start and how this place became all that was left. The only words come from a tape recorder and megaphone—less descriptive than colorfully engaged in metaphor. Story is thus told through Gomez’s expressive movements. Pretzeled and awkward in the arid atmosphere, fluid and confident in the water. We hope she’ll find her way out. That she’ll survive the sabotage coming her way.

What starts with a mannequin hand ushering us behind a red plastic curtain to wind its film reels and present its weathered images eventually returns from its subsequent live-action surrealism to puppetry in the style of Jan Švankmajer or the Brothers Quay. At a certain point, our protagonist must leave her unsafe surroundings and seek salvation through the kindness and opportunism of others willing to provide as long as they also receive. It leads to a marionette finale of acquiescence and dismemberment. Of uncertainty and release. Are we witnessing the truth of this post-apocalyptic world or a prophetic glimpse for our own future? I guess that’s up to you.

Due to the experimental nature of the work, I’m not providing a rating. Its laborious pace renders its intrigue a bit too esoteric for my tastes, but it is very well-conceived, constructed, and performed. Those who seek out underground cinematic art like it should be well-served.