Mad God (2021)

For three decades Phil Tippett labored over a wordless stop-motion descent into a hellscape of gas-masked assassins, torture engines, and excrement-born laborers, and the finished object offers the critic almost nothing to argue with. There is no dialogue. There is no protagonist in any conventional sense. There is a diving bell, a briefcase, a bomb whose ticking hand refuses to complete its circuit. The film is a silent procession of grotesques, and it regards them with the flat, patient gaze of an anatomist. We search the frame for a message and find only texture.

It would be tempting to smuggle meaning into the rubble. The world is ruined, so some will reach for an environmental reading. The drones toil mindlessly and die at their stations, so others will reach for an economic one. The film declines both. Its destruction is cyclical and cosmic, the product of alchemists grinding infants into gold to birth new universes that will repeat the same mistakes. Trains of munitions and graveyards of the dead evoke the horror of war without ever naming a villain or proposing a policy. The monstrous bodies on display are mutilated and mocked, which is the precise opposite of any tender regard for physical form. Nobody learns anything. Nothing is corrected.

Which leaves us with a rare specimen: an artifact of immense craft and zero instruction. Tippett spent his career animating dinosaurs and robots, and here he animates suffering itself, with no interest in telling us how to feel about it. The audience is not scolded, enlightened, or improved. It is simply shown a slaughterhouse and left to sit there. As cultural documents go, this one is a blank slate, and blank slates are becoming harder to find. Sommeliers of the vintage will note the absence of any aftertaste whatsoever.