Premiering at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and dropping into U.S. theaters in the autumn, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was a film that challenged both our notions of the “animal movie” at large and how we assemble and contort images into tidy, digestible narratives, no matter how antithetical to the visual media itself that may be. The director took care to move away from the default anthropomorphism that so many such films are lathered in, rejecting the easy metaphors typically used to engender human empathy in viewers by appealing to their instinctive homocentrism (, and instead attempting to imagine and explore an alien umwelt, abstracting his images more and more as the film moves forward, refusing any easy thematizing in EO’s beguiling spaces. Into that sphere comes another faunal work that sneakily subverts expectations of form: Melissa Lesh and Trevor Frost’s Wildcat. 
Published as part of InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 2
