More than a love letter to Henry the cat, this film drifts into a drowsy performative exercise of life together — gestures, silences, sighs. Mostly horizontal in stance, it moves at a snail’s pace, as if morning never quite ends. What would we be without them?
This film is a letter to Henry, with whom the narrator shares a horizontal life and an immense desire to sleep. Henry is a cat. Henry is also the girl who writes the letter and who finds in the furry creature the projection of a need for comfort and tenderness: “I want a human to rub my head against, and whole days spent under my blankets.”
One sleeps so as not to have to exist: “I do think going to sleep is one of the very best things for people who are unhappy.” Sleep here is not laziness, it is not carelessness, nor is it linked to sin; it is intimacy and comfort; it is a body that curls up like a cat to overcome vulnerability and everything else. Like a snail that retreats when the outside world is all a threat, the narrator also wants to curl up in her blankets and withdraw into herself. This letter addressed to Henry seems, after all, an attempt to overcome the fear of feeling in the form of a declaration of (self-)love to a cat. (Margarida Moz)
