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Milk
Melk
Charel, a bored, balding man in his fifties, still lives with his mother. The clumsy bachelor sees in her pet—a bass in a fishbowl that is far too small—the grandchild he never could give her. When he drunkenly impales the animal on a pitchfork, he sets out to find a worthy replacement. In his utter incompetence, he ends up antagonising the deeply religious villagers.
Jack-of-all-trades Filip Anthonissen sculpts, animates, and edits his 3D characters like an old-school puppeteer in the devilishly funny Milk. He pushes the zany expressions and slapstick antics of Charel and his gang to the limits of what feels human, but stops short of crossing that line. In the uncanny valley that this creates, their emotions are more of an enlarged imitation than an internalisation of them. Wind instruments that serve as vocal sounds, combined with a Romanian sung dance track, reinforce this effect. Vulgarity, mystery, and visual humour reign in this fever dream of a film.