Country Estonia

Incipit Vita Nova (1992)

Incipit Vita Nova is a gloriously strange little thing, and I mean that as a high compliment. Hardi Volmer's Estonian short barely feels like an animation at first, playing more like a surreal live-action oddity, before it tips its hero into a fantastical world and the stop-motion kicks in. I have honestly never seen anything quite like it, and it is an easy three and a half stars.

The turn is the joy of it. What begins as an offbeat short film suddenly drops its protagonist into a dreamscape not a million miles from Alice in Wonderland, at which point the stop-motion takes over and the whole thing becomes wonderfully unmoored. For something clearly made on very little, and made a good while ago now, it is genuinely impressive, inventive and full of texture.

Tonally it is a hoot. There is a strong streak of comic relief running through it, our hero decked out like a clown at one point, fart gags and all, and it never takes itself remotely seriously. What it most reminded me of, oddly, were those bizarre little interstitial shorts MTV used to run between shows in its heyday. It is very MTV in its energy and edit, and I mean that fondly; it would make an absolutely cracking music video.

Three and a half stars. Incipit Vita Nova is a playful, surreal and completely singular curio, the kind of thing you stumble on once and never quite forget. Weird in all the right ways.

Reviewed as part of the Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival's Politics of the Imagination programme.

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Incipit Vita Nova (1992)

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American Beauty (1999)

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

The Babadook (2014)

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

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