Review: Matamortes finds a cosmic war in the struggles of our world

I love when I come across a movie that challenges me. Not necessarily meaning that the film is hard to watch/get through/understand (though I think it's good to tackle such things at times, too), but I'm thinking more of a movie that feels like it's engaging with cinematic language in a different way. Maybe it hails from a different background discipline, or is experimental in some ways. A movie that you have to kind of realign yourself in order to be able to meet it where it's at, which is always my goal when I'm watching something. I want to try to grasp what the filmmaker is going for, and to try to gauge my enjoyment/engagement in relation to those aims. 

Matamortes came on my radar when I was looking at the lineup for Animafest Zagreb, which takes place in the Croatian capital in June. Their competition slate is incredible, and included multiple titles I hadn't heard of, including Maramortes.

I got in touch with one of the film's producers, who gave me some illuminating background that helped me get into the right mental zone before diving in. This is the debut feature from Thiago Martins de Melo, a renowned Brazilian visual artist whose paintings are exhibited around the world. Per the producer, Matamortes is a "'gallery film' at its core." This film, along with the shorts he's previously made, are comprised of his various paintings and drawings. Altogether, he's used more than 9,000 individual paintings and drawings to create his filmography -- a staggering number.

The animation is really unique. You feel the artist's fingerprints all over it. It's mostly rendered in black and red, with occasional dips into blues and grays. There's so much detail, and a wide array of styles/aesthetics that feel like they ought to clash but feel very much of a piece. This is a film that features gods who feel like they hail from millennia ago, as well as robot dogs and drones, and it all just fits together in this dizzying, evocative artistic approach. It's a strange and sobering ride.

When the film started, it felt very much to me like something you might see in a a museum. It starts with a series of static images, some immediately legible (a face, a hand, etc.), some more obscure, harder to parse. I settled in thinking this might be what the movie is: a sort of slideshow creating impressions and meanings from the juxtaposition of different images, creating something like the feeling of walking through a gallery. It wasn't necessarily what I was hoping for, but I was down to clown.

Ends up, that's not what Matamortes is, not even close.

After that opening sequence, the film launches into its story. Via large blocks of text, a world is built out for the viewer, one that paints a picture of a battle on a cosmic scale. Now, as an art piece, I wouldn't say the narrative is the main concern of Matamortes. You could just ignore the text and watch the film and still have a stimulating, fascinating experience. Hell, I read all the text and still found myself a little lost at times, but not in an unpleasant way. But I definitely appreciate that there's a loose narrative here, which gives a kind of mystical glow to the proceedings. (Hopefully, my summary is in the ballpark of what was going on.)

The main conflict is basically this: an anti-cosmic force is imprisoning gods and locking away their weapons, creating chaos, and interrupting cycles of reincarnation. We witness various players in this war as they go about their lives, and we see how the massive conflict envelops and includes more recognizable earthbound events, such as a protest for housing rights, militarized police violence, and activists trying to protect the rainforest from industrial developers. Just as the gods do battle, so do the humans, fighting against the capitalist/Christian/colonialist machine that seeks to oppress, destroy, and otherwise subjugate normal people, making them slaves to systems that care nothing for them.

The film doesn't serve its narrative up on a silver platter, but nor does it (I think) expect you to completely understand everything you're seeing. I never felt completely lost, more like I was occasionally floating in the ether of something big and meaningful and beyond human knowledge. Which, I think is a good place for a film like this to live.