Manivald (2017)
★★½ — Manivald (2017)
Estonia. That was the destination for this leg of my A-Z World Movie Tour, and I genuinely didn't know what to expect. What I got was a short animated film that started with a fairly clear promise, muddied its own message beyond recognition, and then ended before I'd fully figured out what it was trying to say.
The setup feels like it's heading somewhere familiar. There's a grown man still living at home with his mother, a stranger arrives, and the whole thing has the energy of a quiet coming-out story. I settled in thinking I knew the shape of it, the kind of tender, slightly melancholy little film about identity and desire finding its way to the surface. That expectation wasn't unreasonable. The early beats point right at it.
But then the film takes a turn I wasn't prepared for, and not in a good way. The stranger at the centre of it all turns out to be shagging both the son and the mother, and has a wife and kids on top of that. Fine, morally complicated characters exist in fiction, I'm not clutching my pearls over that. The problem is that the film doesn't seem to know what it wants to do with any of it. Is it a dark comedy? A fable about desire and selfishness? A comment on something in Estonian culture I'm not equipped to decode? I genuinely couldn't tell you. By the end, the message, if there even is one, had completely slipped through my fingers. It doesn't land as provocative, it just lands as confused.
There's a version of this premise that could work. A morally chaotic bisexual figure disrupting a domestic setup has comic and dramatic potential. But the short format here, rather than concentrating the story, just means there's no time to earn any of the chaos. Things happen, eyebrows go up, credits roll. I was left sitting there thinking, right, so what was that about then?
The animation doesn't help matters. It's basic, and I don't mean that in a charming, lo-fi way. Some of my favourite animated shorts lean into simplicity and make it work beautifully. I loved Luigi for exactly that kind of stripped-back visual approach. But there's a difference between stylised minimalism and animation that just feels underdeveloped, and Manivald falls into the latter camp. The character designs are flat in a way that doesn't feel like a choice, and it makes it hard to invest in anyone on screen.
I'll give it this: it's not boring. At short-film length, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and there's enough oddness to keep you watching. I just wish that oddness had been in service of something. A strange film is fine. A strange film that doesn't know what it's being strange about is harder to defend.
Two and a half stars. Estonia ticked off the list. Onwards.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-06-13
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