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DIRECTED BY: Rémy Mathieu Larochelle
FEATURING: Julianne Côté, Stéphane Bilodeau
PLOT: One of the last surviving humans has discovered the embryo of the universe, and the hideous monsters who now control the world are desperate to keep him from using it to destroy them.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The parade of unholy stop-motion concoctions gets our attention. The unflinching vision of a filmmaker in his only significant cinematic credit stokes our curiosity. But it’s those things in service of apocalyptic vibes and a story that is both bleak and somewhat irrelevant that pushes this film strongly towards consideration. It’s a movie beholden to nothing but itself.
COMMENTS: One of my favorite obscure novels is Future Boston, a shared universe by a collective of Beantown science fiction writers who imagined the fate of their city if the first alien contact was made smack dab in the middle of Boston Harbor. One of the significant characters in the book is Bishop 24, a mysteriously formal interplanetary overseer, resembling a gigantic praying mantis, who shepherds humanity into the galactic community. Interaction with the Bishop is described thusly: “The Bishop has a habit of moving in a quick, jerky fashion when his attention is distracted. This is unnerving to some people and has been known to cause epileptic seizures.” To depict the movement and bearing of a creature alien to us, the writer essentially describes classic stop-motion animation.
Rémy M. Larochelle undoubtedly recognizes this alien and uncanny quality. For his sole outing as a feature filmmaker, Larochelle unveils a rogues’ gallery of fascinating and appalling creatures. Shot in a dark sepia tone that makes every scene feel like deleted footage from a snuff film, Mécanix feels like a nightmare that the filmmaker was compelled to get out of his system any way he could, and 16mm stop-motion was the only tool he had at hand. Knowing that, he leans into both the imaginative potential and technical limitations of the technique; Mécanix features a remarkable variety of animated critters, looking variously like equine bipedal skeletons, bubo-ridden Buddhas, tree mermaids, wire-brush birds, and bad-permed llamas. Their appearances are already terrifying, but the hallmarks of their animation—spasmodic jerkiness, absence of motion blur—only heighten their disturbing nature. With flailing cable appendages and misplaced heads, they need only be themselves to be the stuff of bad dreams. Daniel Lagacé’s industrial sound design— an array of distorted clangs, whirrs, and whooshes—helps to give the varmints unnatural life.
Through interviews and key art, you can tease out the hint of a plot involving a lost embryo that, if found, will defeat the alien invaders and restore the promise of life to humanity. The live-action scenes exist primarily in service of this throughline. But the story is largely beside the point, as is demonstrated whenever humans and manipulated maquettes are called upon to share the screen. When they do so, the technique is most often a rudimentary split screen, with the actors standing carefully still while the monsters react dramatically to whatever plot development is presented to them. (It’s a reminiscent of the way Björk dances in front of oversized insects in her “Human Behaviour” video, although of course with none of her screen presence.) But the choice works because the aliens, in one of the few pieces of dialogue, explain the deadly power of emotion, so foreign and deadly to them that even the whiff of a flower could destroy them.
Larochelle knows this is only going to work if things get pretty gross. Early on, we watch a doctor search for the embryo by yanking out the innards of her few remaining fellow humans. Later, a man will invert the procedure by vivisecting an avian creature in an impressively effective piece of puppeteering. (In fairness, he’ll end up doing a little grisly self-surgery as well.) And the monsters often take themselves apart and reassemble for locomotion or conversation. None of this is frightening, exactly, but Mécanix is so viscerally broken and oozy that the effect is more powerful than a jump-scare. It all just feels so unfamiliar and not-at-all right.
Larochelle began working on Mécanix right out of college and spent four years filming and animating the piece. It’s a point in favor of his native Canada that a movie like this can not only be made, but even get funding from the National Film Board of Canada. At a lean 70 minutes, it still feels like it could use a little tightening. There isn’t much in the way of conflict: the aliens demand the embryo, the man steadfastly refuses to give it, and the finish has the whiff of anticlimax. But there’s no denying that Mécanix is a singular effort, one that combines animation technique and icky atmosphere in a form that resembles little before or since. You might say that it’s “unnerving to some people.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
