A beautifully colored animation that explores a mother’s absolute and total need to get rid of her husband and children to have a playful afternoon to herself, in pursuit of a roe deer.
From the beginning, there is something deeply unsettling in this film. Perhaps it is the postures, the stiff/frontal characters. The very erect limbs, rigid and bending only at the joints. Frontal in their two-dimensionality, they seem to pose for us in challenging and complex ways and then stare at us once they have struck the pose. The turning of two-dimensionality in the film always carries something directly presentational. All of this makes perfect sense in the film’s narrative. A nuclear family—a mother/father/son/daughter—lives in a house beside a forest. After two intense clashes with an unexpected hunt, the shock of hearing gunshots, and a face-to-face meeting with a deer, the tense—and not entirely happy—mother of the family enters a pulsating vertigo. In the next 24 hours, the line between inner fantasy/time/identity crumbles, and we enter a completely subjective version of this animalistic crisis of social pressures, where symbols and reality act in equal validity. (Vasco Muralha)
