Canadian animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière has described his third and most ambitious feature, film Death Does Not Exist, as a tonal experiment, dropping characters possessed with the urgency of something like the radical FLQ into the time-distended fantasia of Alice in Wonderland. The film’s show-stopping opening scene makes clear why this approach is necessary: after a failed tactical strike on a luxury mansion, a single survivor, Hélène, escapes into the garden on the grounds, which envelops her in a liminal space. There, she can contemplate how her choices — and her inability to fully act with her fellow revolutionaries — led to the deaths of her friends and the survival of their symbolic assassination target, a white-haired matriarch who has, in Hélène’s head, a brutal comeback for every naive slogan she can summon.
Dufour-Laperrière’s choice of animation means we never need to be concerned with the particulars of strategic maneuvers, escape routes, or even the rendering of Hélène’s friends as real characters. Everything is a slightly surreal mirror, awash in a single colour palette depending on the tonal quality of the scene — burgundies, greens, and yellows suggest variations in her dazed rush through the thickets of a dreamed path. The opening action set piece, which slides through space as if each comrade’s death is a panel in a painted diorama, sets a thrilling pace. The rest of the film is an ill match for the Alice comparison.
At the risk of taking Dufour-Laperrière’s elevator pitch seriously, Alice’s wordplay renders sense-making both elusive and completely available to the mind of the reader or interpreter. Hélène, on the other hand, is confronted by the coherently verbose apparitions of two friends. Manon is more radical than she is, and critiques, in a hard yet supportive way, her hesitations. Marc slips Hélène a confessional letter on the way to the mansion site, and offers a different direction, in the way of a comfortable, suburban fantasy. Grappling with these illusions, Hélène’s dialogues and inner monologue are patiently unspooled. Dufour-Laperrière’s script offers space to consider the pros and cons of each position, in a way that amounts to little more than a lot of liberal handwringing.
This is the ultimate balance of the film: for every surreal backdrop or gliding camera movement, there’s a clamped-down meditation on if it’s really so bad to be content with retreating from the world for the sake of “simple pleasures.” And as if to show it’s safe enough to show at Annecy and the Quinzaine, the sympathetic treatment of its opening sequence, what would in most descriptions be branded a terrorist attack, is followed by a decontextualized, evenhanded survey of positions — like its stand-in protagonist, this is a film that doesn’t dare to take a position, except for one in favor of that universal value of Life.
One could call Dufour-Laperrière’s film, in its reliance on animation as an outlet for the malleability of space and thought, and its positioning and subsequent unravelling of action, as the opposite of Godard’s ‘60s films. In La Chinoise or Band of Outsiders, revolutionary thought — or something like it — precedes an uncontrollable, borderline cartoonish, and incompletely satisfying violent act. The foregrounding of education in those films, flaws and all, is married to Godard’s form, which pauses, contradicts, and tests the trajectory of the small radical groups that parade before his camera.
For Dufour-Laperrière, action is purely symbolic and generalized, and exists to be brought in comparison to the film’s ultimate perspective, which values assumptions: even though revolutionary action is taken, Hélène’s mind doubles against this version of events, retelling the story as evasion or, perhaps, a realization she can better live with. This foreclosure of possibilities is strangely anodyne, in a way that never strays into deeply felt regret or division, and instead lists toward therapeutic encouragement. Throughout its runtime, Death Does Not Exist stands out as an impressive display of animation labor, but its narrative arc is as unmotivating and prescriptively moral as any children’s parable.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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