VERDICT: This strange and engrossing short blends a surreal and slippery story about a bizarre online relationship with Stephen Vuillemin’s glorious animation.
A young woman goes online to purchase a web domain based on her name and comes across something deeply unsettling in Stephen Vuillemin’s beguiling animation, A Kind of Testament which competes as part of the Berlinale Shorts competition. The unnamed woman (voiced by Naomi Yang) finds that the website she wants already exists and, very unexpectedly, it is full of animated videos that are clearly based on her social media feeds. The rest of the film then takes the form of these unusual cartoons as they play out on screen while the young woman tries to understand why exactly someone has done this with her likeness.
Right from the opening sequence, the imagery combines a vibrant colourfulness and a bristling vitality with something altogether more sinister and menacing. The camera pans up over a bouquet of flowers, glowing in saturated reds, yellows, and violets – pulsating with life. It pans down again, an instant later, only to reveal them wilted, browning, and covered in flies. As the narrator begins to watch the videos on this bizarre website she finds a similar trend; a still image from her profile is transformed into a weird and often macabre vignette. A selfie in a boutique clothing store expands to show a skeleton creeping towards and then embracing her. A photo of the woman with her dog becomes a scene at a veterinary hospital in which she is faced with the decision of whether to have the dog put to sleep.
Vuillemin’s animation often uses bright but slightly out-of-kilter colour combinations and takes a blocky and blotchy approach to shadow that makes the visuals striking while retaining the oddness of their supposed origins. However, it is this framing account which really brings them to life, feeling somewhat like a short story by Bora Chung. As the film proceeds, it is difficult to shake the sensation that you are watching real, found animations by – it transpires – an older woman who shares the same name as the protagonist and for some reason took this nominative kinship as a license to use her visage in her tortured artwork. A Kind of Testament’s narrative creates an uneasy interrelation between these strangers that manifests in the videos themselves and, hauntingly, beyond.
Director, screenwriter, animation, editing: Stephen Vuillemin
Cast: Naomi Yang, Angela Clerkin, Freida Siddall, Aisha Arden, Bethy Read
Producers: Ugo Bienvenu, Felix De Givry
Music: Charlie Janiaut
Sound: Lucien Krampf
Production company: Remembers, Aycevee (France)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Shorts)
In English
16 minutes