The logical successor to classic mindbenders like PROVIDENCE and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. TIERE (ANIMALS) is a 2017 German production that didn’t make a huge splash in the film world, but is reasonably impressive, dealing fairly adroitly in surreality and reality dislocation. I’m probably being far too generous in comparing to the abovementioned David Lynch and Alain Resnais films, but TIERE’s intent is quite similar to theirs.
A confounding aura is established early on, when a woman is seen jumping out the window of an apartment building’s upper floor, but then the camera pans down to reveal an empty sidewalk. The woman is Andrea, with whom her downstairs neighbor Nick is having an affair.
Another young woman named Mischa is charged with looking after the apartment of Nick and his wife Anna, who are embarking on a country vacation. Mischa has barely gotten the job when she injures herself tripping on a skateboard, and winds up with a bandage on her head (yes, this is significant).
Embarking on their vacation, Nick and Anna run down a sheep on a rural highway. This leaves them with a dead sheep, and Anna with a head bandage identical to one worn by Mischa. Upon reaching the cabin where they’ll be staying, a bird seemingly “commits suicide” by smashing itself against an interior wall of the residence. There’s also the fact that Nick seems to believe they’ve been at the cabin for two weeks, while to Anna (and the viewer) they’ve only just arrived. Furthermore, Nick finds Anna making unexpected appearances in different parts of the house—i.e. he’s seen talking to her at the dinner table only to have her appear behind him a second later.
After Anna learns that Nick is carrying on an affair with a sexy ice cream vendor, a talking cat advises Anna to kill her hubbie. The cat also turns up at Nick and Anna’s apartment to make life difficult for Mischa and Andrea–whose suicide in the opening scene may or may not be a hallucination.
The same of course can be said for most everything in this film. The problem is that a sense of normality is never established—and the climactic twist that’s supposed to explain all the weirdness woefully fails in that endeavor—and so the reality displacement isn’t as affecting as it could have been.
Not that director/co-writer Greg Zglinski doesn’t try his damndest to create a David Lynchian phantasmagoria. The many bizarre elements include a casual shot of the ocean with a giant fork stuck in it that none of the characters appear to notice, and chronology that goes in every direction, freely incorporating dreams and hallucinations into its mix.
It all looks great, with crisp photography that nicely compliments the taut and symmetric compositions. The acting is uniformly top-notch, with a naturalistic bent that feeds into the strangeness of the narrative—something the scripting and direction fail to accomplish.
Vital Statistics
TIERE (ANIMALS)
Be For Films/Tellfilm
Director: Greg Zglinski
Producer: Stefan Jäger, Katrin Renz
Screenplay: Jörg Kalt, Greg Zglinski
Cinematography: Piotr Jaxa
Editing: Urszula Lesiak, Karina Ressler
Cast: Birgit Minichmayr, Philipp Hochmair, Mona Petri, Mehdi Nebbou, Michael Ostrowski, Philip Lenkowsky