Post-apocalyptic visions in mainstream cinema usually serve a practical, introductory function, providing a digestible dose of world-building before plunging the audience into the crux of the story. Far from disconcerting the narrative or inducing a gut sense of turmoil, they establish the new order of things — for there would always be a new one if human society is concerned; the concepts of power, authority, and hierarchy remain intact, albeit in different hands. Chilean director Niles Atallah’s new experimental feature Animalia Paradoxa, on the contrary, is a baffling piece of multisensory art that makes its audience completely lose their bearings in a desolate, grim, and surreal world stricken with human destruction. Borrowing its title from a concept coined by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, Atallah’s film aesthetically appropriates the qualities of “animalia paradoxa,” depicting a world that is utterly uncategorizable — as foreign and implausible as it is familiar in its barrenness, populated with the material remnants of the once ordinary lives of humans. Mixed media would be too simplistic to describe the aesthetics of assemblages that feature within: fabrics, liquids, dust, mud, rust; wooden or porcelain toys, broken and lost parts of unidentifiable objects — those are compositions of muddled, scattered media.
Similar in spirit to Tarkovsky’s “Zone” in Stalker, we only get a glimpse of Atallah’s post-apocalyptic world within the premises of a dilapidated building complex, where a figure in a gas mask, fully covered in a worn-out, spandex-like costume with mismatching colors, roams the abandoned, dingy rooms. The anthropomorphic figure’s dark gray face doesn’t give away much emotion, but they are undoubtedly in search of something related to water. They look for small trinkets among the debris and give them to a pinkish, mysterious hand with long, green nails in exchange for a jelly worm that they feed to a humanoid creature with abundant hair, hanging down in the middle of the courtyard. The figure gathers drops of water from the wet hair and attentively, patiently fills a muddied bathtub, in which they lie and dream of deep waters and sea animals. This figure who clings to the bathtub as if it’s their lifeline, seeking constant refuge within its sparse contents — are they a merman, or maybe even a mermaid? Either way, their whole being yearns for a different, better existence.
Andrea Gomez, who portrays the amphibian figure, delivers a measured yet imposing performance with a pronounced physicality — mostly moving horizontally, crawling, cartwheeling, and always on the edge, staying close to both the floor and the walls. Alongside Gomez’s character, there are other residents of the complex, whom Atallah seems to be less interested in, as they don’t go beyond being background figures in our protagonist’s path. There are several creatures in animal masks, furtively observing the outside world from the thresholds; another one who’s confined to a cocoon-like fabric and a mean-spirited preacher who recites passages from Revelation and, accompanied by her followers, terrorizes the residents.
As an audiovisual form, Animalia Paradoxa is nowhere near comparable to those active, engaging filmic texts that urge or rather (on a more moderate note) invite the viewer to ponder prescribed concepts or ideas related to the existence of nature, the human impact that ends up altering and destroying it, or the meaning of survival in a world where there’s no hope for the future. The ideas themselves are shattered, in rags, covered in dust and grime. In a manner similar to the protagonist, the viewer also has to deal with the conceptual consequences of a fictitious — or perhaps impending — apocalypse, finding their way amidst the debris of gestures, apparatuses, textures, and artistic techniques, and maybe ending up losing it.
Co-founder of Diluvio, which also produced Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña’s surreal animation The Wolf House, Atallah has a vision that fully embraces the mindset of experimentation and the idea of film as a creative laboratory. From black-and-white analog footage of sea creatures evocative of Jean Painlevé’s work to a stop-motion puppet theater that the protagonist gets sucked into in the last act, Animalia Paradoxa is a remarkable work of dark imagination, worthy of masters like Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. However, while the latter are mostly known for work that is mostly contained within the filmic medium, there is something in Atallah’s artistic perspective that calls for exploration beyond the frame — arising from the very composition of the film, which is highly grounded in the materiality of the objects it appropriates. That is not to say that Animalia Paradoxa would work better as part of a multimedia installation or within the context of expanded cinema, but the sense of yearning and desire that overflows from the amphibian creature surely reaches the viewer and makes us want to go outside the decaying building, to maybe observe it from a different angle, or to go and find out where all those lost objects initially came from: in short, to see and hear more about this bleak world before the red velvet curtain comes down and, along with it, takes the last residues of life away.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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