Fantasia Film Festival 2024 Review: ‘Animalia Paradoxa’

Among the first images you see in Niles Atallah’s odd but entrancing Animalia Paradoxa is a screen with the lines, “The mass extinction crept up unheard. Death’s dominion began without a word.” An ominous yet disarmingly zen proclamation of the film’s constructed reality’s collapse. We also see brief flashes of said collapse, but there’s little context for it. It’s impossible to tell when let alone where this all takes place. Frankly, it doesn’t matter.

What’s left of the world are piles of rubble and scavengers looking for anything of interest. One such humanoid scavenger with a gas mask (Andrea Gómez) balletically sifts through rubble looking for liquid so that she may take a bath. The figure never utters a single word, but they dream of making it to the sea. As they doze off, we’re inundated with images of jellyfish and other marine life.

Animalia Paradoxa is certainly not conventional. Scenes of scavengers writhing on the floor, or in one case, contorting themselves within dirty sheets (as one does), seemingly linger for minutes on end. The little plot there is consists of the main scavenger looking for random objects in exchange for a lone gummy worm that a figure with long fingernails offers through a hole in the wall, only for the scavenger to turn around and trade it for water from a figure that has long black hair reaching their toes.

That’s to say, Animalia Paradoxa probably isn’t for everyone, but it’s unquestionably an enchanting, disturbing fever dream for those willing to get on its wavelength. Niles Attalah produced The Wolf House a few years back — a deeply disturbing multimedia animated movie about the Colonia Dignidad — and there’s a clear through-line between the two works. Each is fascinated with the cruelty that mankind is willing to inflict, the lengths they’ll go to survive in the face of it, and, unfortunately, the inescapability of it. Animalia Paradoxa‘s world is a visual nightmare. Moments blur into each other, each just as bizarre and off-putting as the last. Like The Wolf House, Animalia Paradoxa also utilizes marionette puppets in some of its sequences, culminating in a truly displeasing finale.

What does it all mean? Well, have fun trying to piece that together for yourself. Animalia Paradoxa is perfectly happy keeping it weird and cloudy, leaving you with a broad sense of unease rather than concrete takeaways. Though, if you squint hard enough, you’ll see a stark, pessimistic vision of ecological collapse. One full of longing for something better, but with little to no hope of something positive occurring. That time has passed.

Sure, maybe it’s not the happiest film in the world, but its peculiarities are far too interesting and well-crafted to ignore.

Follow MovieBabble on Twitter @MovieBabble_ and follow Nick @nkush42.

Thank you for reading! What are your thoughts on Animalia Paradoxa? Comment down below!

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to MovieBabble via email to stay up to date on the latest content.

Join MovieBabble on Patreon so that new content will always be possible.