Catlady
2018 · 10m · USA
Directed by Max Roux
Tones: melancholic, surreal, tender
A grieving woman buries her cat in the backyard. That night, something shows up in her house offering her a way to bargain with the loss. Grief turns surreal, then sideways.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dead cat short that refuses to be cute about it. Roux lets the grief actually deform the room — Jade Louise is doing the heavy lifting and she's doing it beautifully.
Max Roux treats pet loss with cosmic seriousness — A Ghost Story for cats, but Jade Louise's performance keeps it from collapsing into kitsch. The bargain at the door is the gamble that pays.
Treating pet loss with cosmic seriousness usually reserved for human bereavement, anchored by what the page summary calls a spellbinding performance from Jade Louise — atmospheric elegy is a fragile mode but the framing is honest.
Reviews
An atmospheric elegy, a portrait of grief that spins into the surreal, carried by a spellbinding performance from Jade Louise.