Hmyz (Insect)

Director: Jan Švankmajer
Release date: January 26, 2018
Rating: ★★
Review:

‘Insect’ is Jan Švankmajer’s last film. Even though at the time of writing the Czech master of surrealist cinema is still alive, he announced this film as such. It sure was a difficult film to make, as even crowdfunding was needed to finish the movie.

Unfortunately, the film is not a grand finale to Švankmajer’s glorious oeuvre. Sure, the film’s main story is interesting enough and shows all elements of the Czech director’s idiosyncratic style: surrealist events, morbid humor, extreme close-ups, claustrophobic spaces, a preoccupation with food, and even a splash of stop-motion and cut-out animation, rarely seen since the 1980’s.

In this story an amateur company rehearses the 1921 play ‘Pictures from the Insects’ Life’ by the Čapek brothers. Only part of the troupe is present, and the film features only six characters, who are cramped into a dark, poorly lit space, which give the film an eerie feeling the actors are trapped like insects themselves. Four actors are bullied by an overt ambitious director, while the sixth sleeps through most of the rehearsal. While the inapt actors act out a few scenes from the play, strange events start happening, like insects appearing everywhere, and a dummy coming to life, and several of the actors don’t live through the end of the rehearsing.

This story shows a strong unity of time and space, and is told by Švankmajer with gusto, while his actors delight in portraying the clumsy actors, one even worse on the stage than the other. The actor’s antics are often accompanied by the beginning of Bedřich Smetana’s overture to ‘The Bartered Bride’ (1866), the lively sounds of which contrast heavily with the bad acting on the stage. The sound design, too, is excellent, with its well-chosen unpleasant sounds, as of crawling insects.

However, apparently this main story wasn’t enough material to fill a complete feature length film, and thus the action is constantly interrupted by behind-the-scene footage, showing how the film was made, as well as the real actors telling about their dreams. These scenes often reveal the tricks involved in the film making, and thus spoil the fun of the surrealist main story. But more importantly, they greatly disrupt the main narrative, and the viewer is constantly thrown in and out of the story, which makes the film a frustrating watch, indeed. This choice of adding an extra layer to the film actually makes it a weaker product than it could have been, and although it’s nice to watch Jan Švankmajer at work, it makes the film a sad farewell to his illustrious career.

Watch the trailer for ‘Insect’ yourself and tell me what you think: