The Last Bullet
2023 · 3m
Directed by Geoffrey Bennett Ulrich
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
A three-minute spoken-word animation in which writer-narrator Jon Kinney's poem refrains on 'the last bullet' while the screen shifts through bullets, the bodies they pierce, and the graves that must be filled. Geoffrey Bennett Ulrich's minimalist animated short pleads for a world that runs out of bullets before bodies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A poem about bullets and bodies could be maudlin dogma in lesser hands, but Ulrich's refusal to sentimentalize—just cycling through impact, aftermath, emptiness—actually makes the didacticism disappear; this is restraint as subversion.
Kinney and Ulrich situate themselves squarely in the essay-film tradition of political animation (think Halas & Batchelor, contemporary Muto), and the formal decision to let the voice anchor while image operates as visual argument, not illustration, shows genuine rigor in the form.
The economy here is surgical—three minutes, minimal palette, but Ulrich's choice to let each bullet animation *linger* fractionally longer than narrative comfort allows transforms repetition into weight; that single pacing decision is what makes this land instead of preach.
Reviews
Like the entire Fiona Apple album, Kinney's performance is also marked by a rawness in the recording, which makes the plea contained within the poem feel more urgent, more earnest. The Last Bullet exhorts you to give yourself over to the idealist fantasy that senseless deaths might cease to exist someday, that we might run out—that maybe we will choose to run out—of bullets, before we run out of bodies to put them in.