animistica

Nikki Schuster's animistica opens with the viewer awakening as if inside a restless dream, transformed into a strange vermin. The camera assumes the perspective of an insect burrowing through the dark crumbling underground, kindred to the community of beetles swarming under the idyllic green facade of the lawn in David Lynch's famous opening sequence of Blue Velvet. However, this is no straightforward soil. Organic textures of all kinds interweave and rush by, innumberable macro shots of Mexican flora and fauna morph and melt into a pulsing visual weave conjuring an instinctive sense of creepy crawling by way of a wondrous fantasy biotope. As in nature, change constitutes its basic principle, the interplay of growth and decay: Earth becomes bark becomes bone becomes feathers becomes sand, stone, pelt and fur.

Naturally, this mutating world has its own soundtrack that is no less multifaceted. It crackles and snaps, rustles and scrapes, rattles and chirps – a veritable musique concrète et organique. Paralleling the ambiguity of the image, time and again curious synthetic aural sprinklings sprout in a way that makes you unsure what is "artificial" and what is "natural" to this symphony of sounds. The only thing that is beyond any doubt is the eeriness - to which in fact the entire film tends. An expedition is undertaken in a realm of rotting animal carcasses and rampant spider webs, accompanied by a gloomy droning like sound of hungry swarms of flies. animistica forages around most decidedly in the borderlands of the horror genre. And as is true of its most exciting practitioners, Schuster boldly immerses himself in the darkness, revels in its creepiness, and celebrates the splendor of decay. A kaleidoscope of ecology in all its horrifying beauty. (Andrey Arnold)