The Head Vanishes
2016 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Franck Dion
Genres: animation, drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Jacqueline, an older woman living with dementia, insists on taking her usual train to the seaside despite being shadowed by a woman who says she is her daughter.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as a tender meditation on dementia and loss—but Dion's actually making something weirder, a surreal negotiation between agency and care that refuses the expected emotional beats. The premise sounds like Hallmark; the film subverts it.
Dion situates this in a lineage of animation-as-philosophical-inquiry—think Folman, think Arcand—where form and subject become inseparable; the surrealism isn't ornamental but structural, a formal argument about how dementia fractures narrative itself.
The singular move here is using animation to literalize the daughter's presence as both real and impossible—that visual ambiguity, whether she's actually there or a projection, is achieved through a specific editing rhythm and color choice that does the entire emotional work in nine minutes.