Mourning Cloak

The scouts

A dissociative stowaway thriller that could've been a passport-chase snooze instead becomes genuinely hallucinatory—the surrealism isn't window dressing, it's the engine, and that's the rare move that actually works.

Davies situates the animation within a lineage of European art-cinema thrillers, but the formal restraint—muted palette, measured cutting around the dissociative episodes—feels more indebted to Angelopoulos than to contemporary genre convention.

The decision to animate the dissociation rather than narrate it, letting the backgrounds shift and fragment while Jade remains still, is the film; that single formal choice transforms a by-the-numbers smuggling premise into something that lives in the character's actual nervous system.