Tag Archives: Cristobal Leon

Apocryphally Weird

49*. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)

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“It’s like a Jewish ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but he’s just going to his mom’s house.”― Ari Aster

DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster

FEATURING: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Armen Nahapetian

PLOT: On the anniversary of his father’s death, Beau Wasserman misses his flight to visit his mother; his guilt is magnified by his mother’s surprise death by falling chandelier. He attempts to attend the funeral (to be held immediately in accordance with Jewish tradition), but he is waylaid crime in his anarchic neighborhood, an accident that leaves him in the care of a couple who seem to be using him to replace their dead son, and a wandering theater troupe that spurs thoughts of another possible life. When he finally arrives at his mother’s house, he is surprised by both the appearance of a lost flame from his youth and by a revelation about his mother’s fate that calls into question every aspect of his existence.

Still from beau is afriad (2023)

BACKGROUND:

  • Following his successes in the horror genre with Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster determined that his next project would be a comedy. This is that film.
  • The feature is massively expanded from a short Aster made in 2011.
  • Among Aster’s descriptions of the picture: a “nightmare comedy,” a “Freudian Odyssey,” and “if you pumped a 10-year-old full of Zoloft, and [had] him get your groceries.” Co-star Lane called it “the Jewish Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
  • The animation was created by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cociña, whose work Aster discovered in their Apocryphally-enshrined film The Wolf House.
  • The logo for Mona’s corporation appears among the vanity production cards at the start of the movie. Some have suggested this means she is controlling the very film you are watching.
  • Winner of two 2023 Weirdcademy Awards, including Weirdest Picture and Weirdest Scene for what we chose to call “Phallic Attic.” Phoenix also grabbed a nomination for Weirdest Actor.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Well, this site’s readers didn’t declare it the year’s weirdest movie for nothing. When Beau’s mother coerces him into her attic, he is confronted with three terrifying visions: an emaciated creature chained in the dark who might be a lost twin or an alternate version of himself, the homicidal mercenary who has been chasing him across the country, and (most shockingly) enormous, grotesque monolithic male genitals that throb and scream and kill like the brain bug in Starship Troopers. Beau has been emotionally neutered his whole life, and this is the moment that suggests where his lost manhood may have been this whole time.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Crossing Hell Street; phallic attic

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Beau’s very existence is a nightmare, from the moment that he is born with a wail-inducing smack, and even dating back to the moment of conception that stopped his father’s weak heart. What unspools here is three hours of the intense and unrelenting discomfort that Beau endures just by virtue of being alive. He manages to be both the most luckless man who ever lived and a person who is thoroughly incapable of coping with misfortune. Aster concocts the most elaborate Jewish-mother joke ever told, and he never relents in demonstrating just how awful things can get, and how they can still manage to get worse.

Original trailer for Beau is Afraid (2023)

COMMENTS: Beau Wasserman’s life is governed by a few simple Continue reading 49*. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023) →

Apocryphally Weird

11*. THE WOLF HOUSE (2018)

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La casa lobo

“Like in dreams, where one person can assimilate the attributes of another, the story and characters of the film take on different materialities. All of the changes in the house, characters and objects emphasize the permanent under-construction reality of the film.”–from the director’s statement to The Wolf House

DIRECTED BY: Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León

FEATURING: Voices of Amalia Kassai, Rainer Krause

PLOT: A prologue purports to be a documentary on a Chilean commune founded by Germans; we are told that the film that follows has been restored from their vaults. Those reels tell the story of Maria, a girl who strays from their community and finds herself hiding from a wolf at a mysterious house in the woods. There, she finds and nurtures two piglets, who gradually turn human.

Still from The Wolf House (Las Casa Lobo) (2018)

BACKGROUND:

  • The scenario was inspired by Colonia Dignidad, a colony founded by ex-Nazis in Chile. The colony was often described as a cult and was insulated from its neighbors by barbed-wire fences. From 1961 to 1996 it was led by Paul Schäfer, a refugee wanted for child molestation in West Germany. The colony became the subject of dark rumors among the locals, rumors which were validated after escapees told tales of systematic child abuse inside the compound. The cult survived by allying with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who used the colony as a detention and torture camp.
  • Cociña and León had worked together, and sometimes separately, on a number of award-winning animated shorts before tackling this, their first feature film. The Wolf House took five years to complete.
  • Cociña and León took their sets on the road and worked on The Wolf House at various museums across the world, where visitors watched as they created the animation.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Due to the sheer volume and continually shifting nature of The Wolf House‘s liquid visuals, picking a single image is an imposing task. We will go with the grayscale eyeball that materializes on the house’s wall like a sketch drawn by an invisible pencil, complete with a semitransparent eyelid, a pulsating pupil, and the ability to shake the furniture with its glance.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Pigs with human hands; magic Aryan honey

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Wolf House‘s experimental animation traps us in a constantly shifting nightmare dollhouse: Maria merges into and out of the walls, conjures human features for her pigs, and even the paintings on the walls can’t keep their shape for more than a second or two. The fascist-fairy tale tone is dreamily calm, and inescapably horrific.


Original trailer for The Wolf House

COMMENTS: It’s probably enlightening to have some background Continue reading 11*. THE WOLF HOUSE (2018) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE WOLF HOUSE (2018)

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La casa lobo

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DIRECTED BY: Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León

FEATURING: Voices of Amalia Kassai, Rainer Krause

PLOT: Maria flees her community to avoid punishment and finds an abandoned house; fearing the wolf outside, she sequesters herself with two pigs which she raises as her children.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA LIST: As an experimental stop-motion animation, The Wolf House already has a leg-up against most competition. It becomes a lock for candidacy through its sinister storytelling framework, sociopolitical overtones, and the fact that you watch its settings and inhabitants literally being built up and broken down right before your eyes as its story unfolds.

COMMENTS: Everyone knows that idle hands are the Devil’s workshop; Joaquín Cociña’s and Cristóbal León’s are, on the other hand, a two-man workshop revealing the Devil’s evil. Stop-motion is undoubtedly the most time-consuming filmmaking method; but sometimes, as in The Wolf House, it is the most appropriate. Lacking both real-time film’s quick capture of reality and the infinite malleability of “pure” animation’s ink and lines, stop-motion is a demanding mistress, but one that allows for the uncanniest uncanny valleys and the most “other” other-worldliness. Cociña and León hand-assemble, hand-craft, and hand-paint a dark fairy tale amalgam that itself masks a far darker period in history.

After World War II, a number of prominent German officials fled Europe and cropped up in various points South American. One of those places was the “Colonia Dignidad,” a religious cult compound in Chile. For years, tales of hardship and child abuse drifted through its fortified walls, and the framing of The Wolf House is taken from this period. Presented as a counter-propaganda piece to dispel rumors of a “horrible secret” about this truly “isolated and pure” colony of agrarians, The Wolf House informs the viewer that the film they are about to see was found in the society’s vaults (lovingly “restored” by none other than Cociña and León). The story it tells, in its morphing and cryptic way, concerns a young woman fleeing a harsh punishment meted out by her village’s elders, but eventually learning that the parents know best.

The framing “documentary” is creepily reassuring, easing tonally into the movie proper. For that, it harnesses a variety of stop-motion techniques. Beyond the simplest form (move figure, shoot camera), there’s also “live-painting” animation. A young woman, Maria, seeks shelter in an abandoned house. Upon entering, the walls form in front of the camera, and decorations—bookshelves, clocks, framed pictures—appear and move toward their designated positions as Maria looks around. A woman’s figure eventually appears in a doorway (or mirror?) before branching from the walls in the form of a papier mâché figurine, who eventually finds two pigs—which, through a game she narrates, eventually morph into human children.

The Wolf House is only seventy-five minutes, about ten of which are credits, with ten more being the “documentary” bookends. But it contains countless chilling allusions. As a paneled window is painted on the wall, it ever so briefly appears as a swastika before the rest of the lines are filled in. There’s a mystical honey that causes children who consume it to change from mestizos into blonde Teutonic ideals (the surrounding documentary advertises the German commune’s prized honey). Maria’s fairy tale within the fairy tale concerns animals fleeing into the ground to escape “the wolf”, and a magical tree thanking her for leading them there; in reality, this alludes to the mass graves on the Colonia Dignidad’s grounds. With stop-motion, Cociña and León find that perfect abutment between reality and nightmare; with The Wolf House, they find the perfect abutment between parable and horror.

The Wolf House is currently streamable from distributor KimStim’s website at first-run rental prices ($12 for 26 hours); we’ll update this review when the availability changes.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If an Orwellian fable were to be visualized by a surrealist in the vein of Salvador Dali, the result would look and feel something like ‘The Wolf House’… this shape-shifting, trippy nightmare from filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña startles and terrifies in equal measure, while putting forth an uncompromising examination of fascism in a way that only animation can do.”–Tomris Laffly, Variety (contemporaneous)