"This isn't your average pandemic thriller; here, the infected meld with inorganic material in their surroundings, until their outward contours and their personhood are gone. Thibault Emin's film starts with a little whiff of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen. After their one-night stand, hypochondriac Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and impertinent Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves bunkered up in one corner of a madcap apartment block."
"They banter with the other residents gruff Mr Mouaki (Toni d'Antonio) and his family, an enigmatic Japanese tenant (Lika Minamoto) holed up with her dog down the waste-disposal chutes. Observing the unfolding martial-law response over the internet, they feel safely cocooned, until Cass notices a strange accumulation of pebbles underneath Anx's furniture. After an opening half-hour of somewhat wearing heavy quirks (such as Cass calling her clitoris Ingeborg), Else quickly mutates into something stranger and deeper."
"At first it's hard to fathom what connects the romance and the pestilence plotlines, but as the pair pore over each other's bodies and, around them, the animate and the inanimate, the psychological and the physical, the internal and the external intermingle the film's meaning coheres. With the malady seemingly transmitted by staring a host directly in the eye, Emin seems to be saying that the horrors of intimacy are the only way to evolve."
A visually arresting French film follows hypochondriac Anx and irreverent Cass after a one-night stand as they bunker inside a chaotic apartment block during pandemic lockdown. An entity grows from wooden slats used to barricade windows and begins to infect or merge with people and objects, erasing bodily contours and personhood. Neighbours include gruff Mr Mouaki and an enigmatic Japanese tenant. The narrative shifts from sitcom banter to body-horror and surreal sci-fi, blending psychological and physical boundaries. Transmission appears linked to direct eye contact. The film charts intimacy, contagion and the collapse of reality through varied visual registers.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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