The world as we know it is crumbling.
Rising wealth inequality, a collapsing climate and the continued expansion of unchecked state violence are all bearing down on us. It’s far from a cheery state of affairs, but it’s in this heavy yet unavoidable reality where filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière places us in “Death Does Not Exist.” Thus, it’s where any engagement with his work must also begin.
Despite its title, this is an impressionistic film very much about how death does exist and will haunt us after the moment of loss. While the doesn’t make its subtext 100% explicit, it’s grounded in distinctly modern anxieties about how out of balance the world has become. Brought to life with simple yet frequently stunning animation that can resemble a children’s book with a nightmarish tone, it’s a fable that pushes us to look death in the eyes while clinging to what we value about life. Though his film is hard to fully pin down, Dufour-Laperrière is concerned with what happens when you risk everything to change the world, only to discover the cost is you may lose everything as a result.
Premiering Thursday in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival, “Death Does Not Exist” begins with a group of activists who are about to attack a gated mansion and its wealthy residents. The would-be attackers seem nervous and fearful about what is about to happen, but proceed nonetheless.
A few painfully brief exchanges are used to sketch their mindset, and then the attackers’ world comes apart as their lives end in an exchange of gunfire punctuated by bursts not of not red blood, but a more unsettling, unexpected yellow. It’s like a painting or a rendering of violence, though it’s very real for the members of the group.
When one of the activists, Hélène, leaves the others and retreats into the wilderness, she’s pursued by another member of the party, Manon, who offers her a chance to go back to fight rather than run away.
While the film increasingly becomes about this single choice, “Death Does Not Exist” is never one-note. It bursts with layers of complex emotion and visceral, vibrant visuals. Dufour-Laperrière doesn’t shy away from capturing horrifying violence, using a shifting color palette to make the destruction that much more haunting.
“Are you lost?” a young girl asks Hélène as she wanders through the wilderness, the question referring not just to a sense of topographic uncertainty but an emotional one as well. The film feels increasingly unbound from time as it moves backward and forward from the opening shootout, using this framing to ask the cost of a movement that utilizes violence. Can you save the ones you love, or will it require losing them entirely? How will your existence be reshaped as you take this leap?
Intriguingly, “Death Does Not Exist” neither explicitly condemns nor endorses a path. It doesn’t ever talk down to viewers or judge as much as it sinks into deeper, frequently surreal reflections about how it is that we carry on when everything is being torn apart.
This is felt when Hélène comes upon a sheep being ripped to pieces by coyotes before it’s resurrected. We see every detail and hear every crunch as life turns to death and then comes back again. The animation here is macabre yet still beautiful, taking on a mesmerizing quality as we see the choice that Hélène, as well as all of us, must make.
In every beautifully animated frame, the film makes painfully clear that there is no avoiding this reality. Though the film can still feel as if it loses some of its resonance by not fully laying out the specific motivations of the group, we feel the urgency of the crisis in Hélène’s eyes. No matter how much we may want to get away from the impending destruction, there’s no retreating into the wilderness for any of us.
Though “Death Does Not Exist” is a rather short feature, running only 72 minutes, it is a film of big ideas and expansive existential questions. Even when the presentation is simple, it carries a quietly poetic power. It’s melancholy, frequently mesmerizing, and ultimately moving in how it asks us to ponder the painful choice facing the world.
That it eventually returns back to where it began to take us through the inciting incident all over again only makes it that much more effective as it cuts open the aching wound at its heart. Dufour-Laperrière doesn’t ultimately offer any easy answers, instead immersing us in the reality that there are none. In a gutting closing tableau, he finds a truthful, honest beauty in our crumbling world.
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