In Full Bloom
2019 · 10m · USA
Directed by Maegan Houang
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Widowed Vietnamese hoarder Cecile orders worms for a houseplant; the worms open a black hole that slowly devours her home. Grief, but as practical stop-motion physics.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A grieving widow, a houseplant, a packet of worms, an expanding void — and crucially, no CGI. Practical stop-motion cosmology in a domestic register is the genre I want to live in.
Houang builds a practical-effects stop-motion black hole that devours a Vietnamese hoarder's home — Apichatpong domestic mysticism via a Quay Brothers terrarium. Grief as physics, beautifully literalized.
Stop-motion black hole built with practical effects to dramatize a Vietnamese widow's grief swallowing her hoarder home — that's a brave craft choice and Kieu Chinh as Cecile is loaded casting. Hoarding-as-production-design is the kind of detail that tells me Houang takes the work seriously.
Reviews
An impressive feat of surrealist world-building, that finds at its center a woman yearning for growth but trapped by unexplainable forces.