Tag Archives: Existential

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE (2001)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

FEATURING: , , , , , Tony Shalhoub

PLOT: A stoical barber develops a plan to blackmail his wife’s employer, which spirals out of control.

Still from the Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

COMMENTS: The Coen Brothers began their career in film noir with Blood Simple (1984), and much of their subsequent work has either referenced or revolved around noirish themes. Blood Simple, alongside Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), are classic neo-noirs in rural settings. Non-noir offerings like Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991) still feature doomed, alienated heroes and challenging ethical dilemmas, and even The Big Lebowski (1998) flirts with noir themes with its complicated crime caper in an LA setting. But The Man Who Wasn’t There is their one take on the classic formula: post-war period setting, chiaroscuro cinematography, carefully-planned crime that goes horribly wrong, moral corruption, and a flawed protagonist increasingly resigned to his dim fate. Who wouldn’t want to see the brothers give their straightforward take on film noir, with all the moralistic nihilism that implies?

The plot is a classic noir knot: a “simple” act of blackmail leads to a pair of unintended murders, which leads to the wrong person being put on trial, which, in a roundabout way, eventually leads to misplaced but ironically appropriate justice. Our antihero, Ed Crane, is a disaffected barber who is only slightly more engaged with the world than Mersault. He tolerates his job; he likes his wife and their passionless life together well-enough, even though he suspects she may be cheating on him. His descent into crime happens on a whim, to garner investment funds after hearing a pitch by a dry-cleaning entrepreneur. He’s a man of few words, except when it comes time to deliver expository voiceovers.

In some sense, there isn’t a lot there in The Man That Wasn’t There. Although there are twists, the plot often drags, like Ed Crane’s own mundane suburban life. But for a single bad decision, Ed would not have left much of a mark on the world: he would have glided through life silently cutting hair and smoking cigarettes, dispassionate and content to watch life slip by. He’s a barber by profession, but it’s just something he drifted into; really, “that'”barber” is too much of an identity for him. As he says, he “just cuts the hair.” In the course of the film, he develops exactly two passions: once, his brief interest in dry-cleaning, and a more substantial interest in the teenage daughter of a drunken customer (it’s not what your dirty mind is thinking; he’s charmed by her faltering rendition of a Beethoven piano sonata). Both times, his sudden engagement with the world leads him to unwitting tragedy.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is, mostly, a solid, authentic rendition of the classical noir style. It only departs from the 40s formula in a few particulars. Homosexuality is acknowledged and plays a role in the plot; Ed’s slightly inappropriate fixation on Birdy also crosses a line that would have barely been hinted at by the previous cinematic generation. Further, the film is more obviously and artily existential than its forebears. The Coens humorously reference Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (absurdly, Ed’s trial lawyer wants to make it the centerpiece of his defense), which presages their more thorough exploration of the enigma of Schrödinger’s famous feline in A Serious Man. Finally, the movie’s weirdest element (perhaps its only weird element) is the mysterious usage of UFOs as a metaphor for…. something (modern man’s futile search for meaning in the universe?) But these eccentricities hardly depart much from the source homage, making The Man Who Wasn’t There a satisfying throwback to a simpler age, when people were more complex.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a curious mix of tragedy and humor filmed in stark black and white… succeeds in establishing a mood of existential absurdity..”–Robert Roten, Laramie Movie Scope (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Lee Taylor. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

No Image

The Man Who Wasn't There (Criterion Collection)

    Go to Amazon
    List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DECORADO (2025)

    2 Comments

    366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY: Alberto Vázquez

    FEATURING: Voices of Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz, Kandido Uranga (original Spanish); David Goldstein, Marissa Parness, Peter Giles (English dub)

    PLOT: Arnold, a mouse, feels like he’s trapped in an artificial reality.

    Still from Decorado (2025)

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Decorado combines two seemingly out of place aesthetics—cute cartoons and psychodrama—but also uses an Orwellian dystopia as camouflage to discuss themes that are far more existential in nature.

    COMMENTS:  Alberto Vázquez’s animations distinctly combine the cartoonish with a heavy dose of pessimism and existentialist dread. His latest feature effort, expanded from his eponymous short film, is no different. What is new is the ambiguous nature of the surrounding environment, a perfect metaphor for the confusion and angst of these anthropomorphic animals. But let’s start from the beginning.

    The story revolves around mouse Arnold and his wife Maria. They live in a town structured like a miniature capitalist system, where a major corporation named ALMA governs everything. Both mice are social outcasts. Arnold remains unemployed for years, while Maria struggles to build a career as a graphic designer. Feeling exhausted by this way of life, Arnold wants to believe there is something more, a figurative and/or literal way of escape. A dark forest surrounds his hometown, and he can’t stop wondering about what might exist beyond that. Perhaps somewhere beyond lies the ideal world of absolute freedom and truth that he desperately desires.

    The parabolic tone of this plot is clear. Arnold lives in an Orwellian nightmare where extensive surveillance is the norm, everyone takes medicines to stay calm and happy, and class differences are tremendous. As Arnold rebels, he finds companionship in an eclectic variety of characters, but at the same time he pays a price, by discovering the true nature of his cage.

    This is not a social parable, even if it starts like one. It existentialist—almost nihilistic—in nature. Later revelations recall The Truman Show (1998), as the line between what is real and what is a facade starts to blur. That film, however, had a clear ending and catharsis, offering a concrete explanation for its world. Here, no easy answers are given. As the owl-guardian of the forest says, in this case “the (whole) World is a stage” and, perhaps, there is nothing beyond that other than the vastness of a cosmic void.

    From a philosophical standpoint, Decorado has some parallelisms with Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain (1973): both movies deconstruct ideas regarding salvation and a ultimate truth by constantly reminding us, in a Brechtian way, that everything is  artificial, props and cardboard cutouts on a theatrical stage. Decorado is undoubtedly darker in tone, however, and not so explicitly didactic.

    Decorado‘s narrative also works as a portrait of psychopathology. Vázquez’s works are always interested  in exploring the world of the mentally ill. In Birdboy (2015) a teenage boy shows symptoms of schizophrenia; Unicorn Wars (2022) studies the mindset of a sociopath. Here, Arnold’s wife struggles with depression—in the form of a Tinker Bell-like fairy that follows her around—while he is diagnosed with derealization disorder. Clinically defined, derealization (also known as depersonalization or dissociation) is a sense of detachment from reality—a gut feeling that something is off about the world. Decorado can therefore also be interpreted, through a strictly psychological prism, as an externalization of Arnold’s disorder. A work of art can be read in many ways, after all.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “This paranoid and dystopian vision of life under capitalism is grim but funny—surreally cartoonish yet filled with sarcastic adult ennui, like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space punctuated by a dose of Happy Tree Friends‘ goofy gore, eventually approaching something fearful and self-referential enough to evoke the existential absurdity of Charlie Kaufman.”–Jacob Oller, AV Club (contemporaneous)

    Channel 366

    CHANNEL 366: THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS (2023-2026)

    9 Comments

    366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

    RecommendedWeirdest!

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Voices of Lizzie Freeman, Alex Rochon, Michael Kovach

    PLOT: A young woman arrives in a strange alternate reality.

    Still from The Amazing Digital Circus

    COMMENTS: Glitch Productions was founded in 2017 in Sydney, Australia, as an independent studio specializing in animated web series. “The Amazing Digital Circus,” its latest effort, is the show that stands out the most from the crowd, at least at first glance, thanks to its zany art style. But there are many layers hidden underneath the visuals.

    The plot revolves around an alternate digital reality, where trapped souls live in cartoon bodies under the surveillance of a giant mouth with eyes named Caine. None of them remembers their real name, and they are given new ones as soon they appear in this place. The newest arrival, a clown-like woman Caine names Pomni, is the story’s main focus. Her point of view is our entry point to get to know this strange realm and the people that inhabit it.

    Every once in a while Caine gives a nonsensical quest to the trapped souls, like facing bandits in a fantasy kingdom or working in a fast food restaurant, as a distraction so that they can forget that there is no escape from their digital hell. More often than not, these quests prove excruciating, playing out like a parody of tropes of reality TV shows or video games. There is a mystery-box aspect to the world, too, with possible existentialist undertones as our characters can’t stop attempting to escape. Imagine TV shows like “Lost,” “From,” or “The Prisoner” combined with Looney Tunes animation and you get a sense of the style.

    The best comparison for this show in its entirety would be “Dispatches From Elsewhere” (2020); the way “Digital Circus” develops The Matrix‘s ideas while simultaneously putting an emphasis on character development recalls “Dispatches” in cartoon form. In fact, character development is the most important part of this adventure, what makes it relatable and meaningful in the end, as our heroine and her newfound friends find meaning in their connections and companionship by caring for each other—with some exceptions.

    While it may seem at first that every character fits an archetype, they gradually reveal more depth. Through the tasks Caine gives them and their intimate private interactions, their personalities and worldviews come to the forefront—as well as their deepest fears, insecurities, and secrets. They may not remember their names from their previous life, but they recall events that happened to them and retain their sense of self; for the time being, at least, because in this world there is the threat that they will eventually be consumed by despair and become “abstracted,” transforming into an amorphous mass —the digital equivalent of dying.

    In the end “Digital Circus” is a distorted mirror of real world anxieties, especially those of young adults in their 20s. The series is not afraid to tackle dark issues regarding interpersonal relationships and family dysfunctions. The dreamcore-inspired aesthetic and sci-fi twists are just the surface. Underneath that are real human tales waiting to be shared.

    “The Amazing Digital Circus” streams exclusively on Netflix; it was a big enough hit that the final episode was briefly released to theaters in 2026.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…combines some surreal CGI animation with some sharply funny dialogue and characters that quickly become more than just the avatars they’re assigned in the digital RPG they’re stuck in.”–Joel Keller, Decider

    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MAGUS (1968)

    4 Comments

    366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

    DIRECTED BY: Guy Green

    FEATURING: Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna Karina

    PLOT: Commitment-phobic English teacher Nicholas Urfe escapes his girlfriend by traveling to Greece to take a job vacated by his predecessor’s suicide and meets a wealthy eccentric whose activities seem to center around Nico himself.

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When babe-in-the-woods Anne tells her wayward boyfriend, “Oh, Nico, this is life, not an existentialist novel,” it’s not a self-own. She’s having a go at all of us for trying to apply the tenets of reality to a tale that’s really half-philosophical treatise, half-rejection of conventional storytelling. It’s gleefully existentialist, leveraging a traditional leading man and spectacular Mediterranean vistas in service of a full-throated mockery of expectations. The Magus is aggressively weird—even hostile—to anyone who would try to make sense of it.

    Still from The Magus (1968)

    COMMENTS: “You have entered the Meta-Theater!” declares Anthony Quinn. How utterly baffling that must have been to mainstream audiences in 1968, long before the idea of a metaverse was common parlance and entertainment made a regular habit of sledgehammering the fourth wall into oblivion. Here they are, expecting to see a film about Michael Caine playing fast and loose with the affections of beautiful young women, and this intervening plotline keeps showing up in which Quinn alternately casts Caine in the role of confidant, spy, and test subject. If viewers were confused, that was apparently echoed by the actors themselves: Bergen complained that she never knew what she was supposed to play, while Caine reportedly has named The Magus as one of the worst movies he has ever made (a fantastic claim, especially to any of us who have seen Jaws: The Revenge). If the people making the movie don’t know what’s going on, that’s not going to make it easy on the rest of us.

    Toying with structure seems to have been author John Fowles’ whole thing, utilizing tools like split narratives and multiple endings to heighten the uncertainty of existence. Given that Fowles insisted on adapting his own novel (having been unhappy with the previous adaptation of his work, The Collector), we can assume that everything is playing out exactly as he intends. So when protagonist Nico takes a walk through the Greek countryside that just happens to end up at the palatial estate of Conchis (Quinn, styled after Picasso, right down to the bald head and striped shirt), that’s all part of Fowles’ plan. There’s something amusing about the way Conchis changes his story, including his name and profession, every time we meet him. What boring people we must be to try and tie him down to a single identity.

    Caine initially seems ideally cast as Nico. After all, it would take someone with his reputation for playing distinctly chilly characters like the brutal spy Harry Palmer or the caddish Alfie to be so cruelly dismissive of the beautiful and adoring flight attendant Anne (a fetching Karina). From that perspective, he seems ideal to portray a man so disdainful of commitment that when his girlfriend asks him to take a later flight to spend more time with her, he promptly books an earlier one. But as he becomes more enmeshed with Conchis’ machinations, which seem to revolve around the hapless beauty Lily (an airless, seemingly dubbed Bergen) but are really more of an indictment of Nico himself, Caine’s aloofness becomes a poor fit. Even when he’s tied up and confronted by the entire populace of the town (and a goofy computer), Caine feels far too confident, too safe to be genuinely threatened by the existential crisis that’s landed upon him.

    Ironically, it’s the most straightforward, unadorned scene that retroactively justifies all the metaphysical tricks we’ve seen at play. Conchis’ flashback to his days as the puppet administrator during the Nazi occupation, when he was asked to make a Trolley Problem decision about the fate of the townspeople in the wake of a Resistance action, is a perfectly pitched as a tense, straightforward piece of drama, and its exposure of the cruelty of man. We know enough about both Nico and Conchis to understand how they’ve reached this point, and it makes sense that Quinn would reject the absurd limitations of logic. He’s got the more compelling case, so the ensuing lunacy he perpetrates seems only right.

    Unfortunately for Fowles, he cannot quash the natural impulse of film to present even the most ridiculous situations in the stark light of reality. As Nico is left to reflect on his experience, we’re asked to judge what we’ve seen. Was it all just a dream? Has Nico been punished for his infractions? Is this an elaborate revenge on Anne’s part? Philosophy thrives in the uncertainty, but film demands an answer. That’s the paradox of The Magus: after two hours rejecting the tedium and pointlessness of reason, it just can’t quite give it up.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “The Magus is one of the weirdest films of the late 60’s… those anticipating the standard fare will no doubt be left scratching their head in disquieted belief – their expectations tossed down a well.” – Gary W. Tooze, DVD Beaver

    (This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)