Dance of the Spirits (2026)
Every so often a film stops me in my tracks on the strength of its images alone, and Andreea-Lorena Florea's Dance of the Spirits is one of the rare ones. It is a six-minute animated short that is, visually, among the most beautiful things I have seen all year, and it carries its dark subject with a tenderness and a craft that left me genuinely mesmerised. Four stars, and a wholehearted recommendation.
The story follows Matei, a young shepherd boy on the outskirts of Romania who finds more comfort among his sheep than with his abusive, alcoholic father. The ache at its centre is that Matei has begun to mimic that same violence himself, and the film sits with the terrible question that raises: who am I, if I am becoming the thing that frightens me? It is heavy material handled with real delicacy, a study of how cruelty is passed down and of a child trying to work out whether he can refuse the inheritance.
But I will be honest about where this film truly got me, and it was the art. Every single frame looks hand-drawn, a vivid pencil-and-chalk style that is alive with texture and movement in a way computer-smooth animation almost never is. It is vibrant and tactile and strange, and for a short of just six minutes it must have taken hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual drawings to make. You can feel that labour in every image, and it pays off completely. I spent much of the runtime simply marvelling at how it looked, the way the firelight and the spirits of the title move across the screen, and I would happily watch it again with the sound off just to drink in the craft.
If anything holds it back from an even higher mark, it is the very brevity that makes its handmade quality so astonishing. At six minutes, and with almost no dialogue, it leans hard on mood and image to carry a story that could have breathed a little more, and I found myself wanting just a touch more room to sit with Matei before it was over. It is a small complaint about a film whose economy is also part of its power, but it is the thing that keeps me from the top of the scale.
Four stars. Dance of the Spirits is a gorgeous, haunting and quietly brave little film, a piece of animation that treats a painful subject with care and wraps it in some of the loveliest imagery you will find in a short this year. For the artistry alone it is worth seeking out, and it marks Florea as an animator of real, rare talent. Highly recommended.
Dance of the Spirits screens at the BFI London Film Festival.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014), The Dark Knight (2008)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More animation: The Clouds of Odessa (2026), The Bird's Placebo (2026), Babyface (2026)
