Sh*t Happens
2019 · 13m · Slovakia
Directed by David Stumpf, Michaela Mihalyi
Genres: animation, dark comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
In an apartment block aboard a boat, a bored janitor, his sexually frustrated wife, and a lonely widowed deer drift through alcohol, desire, and solitude, their small domestic dramas played out entirely without dialogue.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A deer in an apartment on a boat with a sexually frustrated woman and a drunk janitor, zero dialogue, somehow hilarious—this is exactly the kind of premise that makes people say 'wait, WHAT?' before realizing it's working. Everyone else would've passed on the weirdness; Felix picked it because the weirdness IS the point.
The formal restraint here—sustaining narrative and emotional texture through pure visual storytelling and sound design in 13 minutes—positions this in a lineage of animated silence-cinema that extends back through Pixar's wordless sequences to classic pantomime, executed with compositional precision.
The decision to cast a deer as the emotional anchor in a story about human loneliness is the kind of lateral-thinking choice that shouldn't work but does, and it's that single committed choice that elevates what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely tender and strange.
Reviews
Ce qui fait qu'il jongle avec virtuosité entre gaudriole vulgos issu d'un imaginaire que l'on pourrait rattacher aux années étudiantes et une mélancolie assez touchante. Les deux cinéastes ont le talent de nous faire comprendre les enjeux sans le moindre dialogue parlé.