Piscina
2015 · 14m · Suecia
Directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr
Genres: animation, comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Six animals meet at a swimming pool: the horse in charge, a fanatic of order and silence, two wolves who will not stop fighting and three mice out to have fun, until everyone's plans go wrong.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A swimming pool as a microcosm of social collapse should be dumb, but Lindroth von Bahr somehow makes the horse's tyranny of silence genuinely unsettling—it's like watching order itself become the monster, which is exactly the kind of premise inversion everyone else would botch.
The formal restraint here—that deadpan palette, the rigid compositional staging—situates itself squarely in a lineage of Northern European stop-motion that prizes control and behavioral observation, Tati's principles filtered through felt and wire.
The choice to keep the horse's face immobile while chaos erupts around it is the entire film: that one decision transforms a silly premise into something genuinely unsettling, and you feel the budget constraint become an aesthetic superpower.