To Fall Among the Cattails
2017 · 8m · Canada
Directed by André Desrochers
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A Dundee rag-and-bone man faces comic misfortune, from a snapping turtle bite to watching his cherished homestead fall into ruin.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A rag-and-bone man getting systematically destroyed by turtles and entropy in rural Dundee—this is the kind of premise that sounds like a fever dream pitched by someone who actually *lives* there, not a derivative indie quirk-fest. Desrochers commits to the absurdist logic so completely that the misfortune stops being sitcom fodder and becomes genuinely unsettling.
The film's restraint in its darkly comic register demonstrates formal control; it locates itself in a tradition of Canadian documentary-inflected portraiture without descending into sentimentality or easy pathos. The accumulation of small indignities achieves its effect through measured pacing rather than manufactured chaos.
There's a choice here—whether it's the casting, the refusal to cut away during moments of real damage, or the sound design of that turtle bite—that makes the difference between a tonal exercise and something that actually *stings*. The economy of the 8 minutes suggests every frame was earned rather than padded.