The Ape Man
2017 · 11m · Bélgica
Directed by Pieter Vandenabeele
Genres: comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, whimsical
A short, chubby man lives on the top floor of a skyscraper and works as a dustman by day. At night, the man watches Tarzan films and dreams of a lush jungle on the roof.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone wants to celebrate the whimsy here, but what actually breaks the film open is that it refuses the fantasy—the roof stays concrete, Tarzan stays on screen, and the man stays small. It's a subversion wrapped in a lullaby, and most scouts will miss the teeth.
Vandenabeele's formal restraint—the measured pacing, the compositional stacking of interior/exterior, the way he lets the Tarzan footage breathe as text rather than spectacle—locates this firmly in a lineage of Northern European lyric cinema, Tati adjacent, rigorous in its refusal of sentiment.
The genius move is the casting decision: that specific body type—the stubborn, unremarkable ordinariness of the man—makes the entire premise work. Without it, this is cute; with it, the gap between dream and flesh becomes heartbreaking, and suddenly an 11-minute film about a dustman punches way above its budget.