La mort n’existe pas Review
La mort n’existe pas / Death Does Not Exist (2025) Film Review from the 29th Annual Fantasia Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Félix Dufour-Laperrière and starring Karelle Tremblay, Barbara Ulrich, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven, Zeneb Blanchet and Irène Dufour.
Filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s wrenching and hugely ambitious animated tale of sorrow and the quest for meaning, Death Does Not Exist (La mort n’existe pas), is so abstract in its execution that enjoying it depends more on what you interpret the images to symbolize than what the movie shows or says to make points on its own behalf. What a viewer can bring to the table here based on the images which appear on-screen is something that can ultimately be either a great experience or a difficult, frustrating one for a particular audience member. A movie like this is in a category all its own, making it a completely immersive experience for those who are up to the film-going challenge that Death Does Not Exist poses.
This movie starts with a group of revolutionaries ready to take out some seemingly wealthy opponents. Blood is shown in yellow as it oozes from a couple of victims at large. Can bravery change the dynamic of the human experience or is it simply a suicide mission to die for a cause that is seemingly just and worthy? Hélène (voice of Zeneb Blanchet) is our central character here who strays from the mission to try to put things into perspective and that she sort of does as what follows is enough to challenge any movie-goer looking for a traditional cinematic experience.
Analyzing the title is a good way to try to get a feel of what the new film is trying to do. If death doesn’t exist, then complex characters like Manon (voice of Karelle Tremblay) can exist in the forest alongside our lead, Hélène as they share meals together to stay alive. It’s not always clear what the director of this film wants to accomplish other than laying out a landscape of deep, detailed images and sounds which coalesce to tell an abstract story where its inner meaning is more important than whatever plot details one may expect to unfold as the film proceeds.
Life, death, war, peace, inner tranquility, the existential quest for justice: These are just some of the themes this movie tackles head-on in a way that could inspire and frustrate in equal doses. There’s a minimalist style to all this where only the barest details are made visible to the audience though the images that are shown on the screen. The colors are often flat and though there are distinct qualities to the movie overall, there is also a heavy core to be found at the center of all of this which makes it fascinating viewing even if you can throw away the pen and paper if you’re trying to piece every single piece of the puzzle together. It’s better to immerse yourself in the film’s dark, intriguing and grim world in order to maximize the profound experience this film creates for its audience.
The stitching back together of severed parts is a metaphor that is at the key meaning of the film. Parts of life that are meaningful and effective versus parts of life which are cruel and unnecessary. This film explores them both and a lot more in its brief 72-minute running time. While it’s an effective movie, it’s also too ambiguous to bring anything to the surface that isn’t already in the mind of the viewer watching it. When the director displays ghastly images of death and people running for cover, there is the opportunity to reflect on meaningless violence versus violence that could, potentially, serve a purpose for the greater good.
I don’t know everything this movie wants to accomplish, but I think the viewer’s interpretation of it is going to be unique to the specific person watching it. Those who have experienced the desire for change and a greater world and understand the cost of it could be human suffering will understand the director’s intentions. Ultimately, despite the movie’s deep characters, those characters are, in the end, portals for us to travel through to understand the frustrations that war, and existence, itself, brings to the table.
Death Does Not Exist is a solid effort that demands multiple viewings. Wolf images help bring to light the differences between humans and animals and show how the similarities between them may be more present than we’d like to believe. If you like movies like The Tree of Life, Death Does Not Exist is almost on that same grand scale, except it’s animated instead of live-action. This is a film to revisit a second time for clearer interpretations of the events which unfold within it. All the voice-over work is fine here, but the movie is essentially about the images, above all else, and how they sit in your mind. Those visuals will most likely provoke thoughts long after the film ends.
Rating: 7.5/10
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