Genre Comedy

The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia (2019)

Item: The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia (2019)

There's a particular frustration that comes with a film you want to love. Not boredom, not indifference, but something more nagging: the feeling that the film is reaching for something real, something worth your time, and you're just not quite able to grab it back. That's where I landed with The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, and I've been turning it over in my head ever since trying to work out why.

The cult following this thing has accumulated makes a kind of sense to me. The ideas it's wrestling with, belief systems collapsing under their own weight, the seduction and horror of conformity, the total void that opens up when meaning drains away, are genuinely worth exploring. And I don't think the filmmakers are insincere about any of it. There's clearly passion behind this project, a real drive to make something challenging and strange. You can feel people caring about it, which matters.

But caring about a film and connecting with it are two different things, and I just didn't connect.

A big part of that is the animation itself. I know, I know: low budget, underground sensibility, intentional rawness. I've made my peace with rough visuals before. I genuinely love Fantastic Planet, which has its own deliberately strange, sparse visual language, and that film proves beyond any doubt that limited resources don't have to mean limited impact. But there's a difference between a stripped-back aesthetic that serves the story and animation that just feels unfinished. Here, the character movement is stiff in ways that aren't expressive, the backgrounds repeat in ways that aren't hypnotic, and the overall visual chaos too often pulls you out of whatever point the film is trying to land. Underground charm can carry a lot, but it can't carry everything.

Then there's the writing and the performances. The voice acting is flat in a way that doesn't feel like a stylistic choice, it just feels thin. And because the script isn't doing enough heavy lifting either, the satire never really bites. It wants to be biting, maybe even revolutionary, and you can sense it straining toward that. But straining isn't the same as arriving. At a certain point it starts to mistake confusion for profundity, and that's a trap a lot of ambitious low-budget work falls into. The challenging stuff needs something to anchor it, something to make the discomfort feel earned rather than arbitrary.

I couldn't get there. I sat with it, I tried to meet it on its own terms, and I came away feeling like an outsider looking at a private language I didn't quite speak. That's a genuinely strange experience with a film this openly confrontational about big, universal themes.

Look, I'm not going to pretend my reaction is the definitive one. The people who love this film love it fiercely, and I don't think they're wrong to, exactly. Different films unlock for different viewers, and there's something here that clearly unlocks for a lot of people. I'm just not one of them, and I'd rather be honest about that than talk myself into enthusiasm I don't feel.

Giving it two and a half stars feels almost generous in terms of how the experience landed for me, but it also feels right when I account for the ambition and sincerity on display. It's a noble experiment. A genuinely unusual piece of work that dares to be difficult. I just don't think it quite works as a film, and in the end, that's the only question that matters.

Two and a half stars.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-11-01

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