Skhizein
2008 · 13m · Francia
Directed by Jérémy Clapin
Genres: animation, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
After being struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry is condemned to live exactly 91 centimeters away from his own body. He searches for temporary fixes that let him keep up an apparently normal daily life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise is genuinely weird—a man offset from his body by exactly 91 centimeters—but Clapin plays it weirdly *straight*, which defuses the subversion; it's too formally composed to actually make you uncomfortable.
Clapin's control here is immaculate: the 91-centimeter constraint becomes a formal device that structures every frame, every edit, every spatial relationship, situating the film squarely in the lineage of conceptual animation where the rule *is* the content.
The single decision that matters is committing to the fixed offset as a visual grammar rather than a gag—every shot has to account for that displacement, and watching Clapin solve that spatial puzzle frame after frame is what makes a one-joke premise into something sculptural.