Thomas
2014 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Pedro Pires, Robert Lepage
Genres: drama, romance, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In London, a doubtful brain surgeon named Thomas and Montreal jazz singer Marie, facing brain surgery, meet by chance and briefly find and lose each other in an existential urban fable.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lepage's surrealist urban fable feels too polite for its own good—the existential premise dangles without bite, and the chance meeting of a surgeon and singer reads like a Terrence Malick fever dream that forgot to question why we're watching it.
A formally considered meditation on mortality and connection that situates itself in the lineage of European art cinema; the interplay between surgical precision and jazz improvisation is a controlled metaphor that justifies its own existence through rigorous visual grammar.
The decision to let Marie's singing breathe as actual performance rather than soundtrack flourish transforms what could be maudlin sentiment into something genuinely unsettling—it's the one choice that makes the whole small-scale collision matter.