Demon and Marvels
1977 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Bertrand Langlois
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A small white cube bumps through a silent geometric world, chased by a demon in a wordless allegory of confronting one's private demons.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A geometric cube getting chased by a demon sounds like the kind of undergraduate symbolism that makes you groan, but Langlois actually pulls off something weirder—the refusal to explain or sentimentalize the chase becomes its own subversion of the allegory you think you're watching.
Langlois positions this cleanly within a lineage of structural animation and Surrealist abstraction; the wordless pursuit is formally rigorous enough to hold up against early Brakhage or the NFB's own experimental canon, and that geometric restraint is what makes the darkness land.
The decision to keep the cube's movement perfectly mundane—just bumping, not fleeing—while the demon's pursuit escalates creates an unbearable tension on a shoestring; that one choice of pacing asymmetry is what transforms a simple premise into something that sticks.