Rob Munday
The synopsis of a film can often be a key indicator of whether that particular story will appeal to your particular taste. In the case of Luca Toth’s Lidérc úr (Mr. Mare), the excerpt prepares us for the weirdness within, but what it doesn’t allude to is the surprising emotional depth contained in its surreal storyline.
“I wanted to make a surrealistic movie about how someone falls in love”
When finding an unexpected lump on your body, I can’t imagine the sequence of nightmarish scenarios that play out in your mind. For the ‘young handsome man’ at the centre of Toth’s 20-minute short, an x-ray reveals the growth he discovers on his chest to be outside the usual diagnosis of this abnormality. Instead of the tumour, he might well have been expecting, our good-looking protagonist learns his swelling is, in fact, the crown of a tiny man’s bald little head.
The x-ray reveals the growth to be something totally unexpected.
Part body horror, part love story, Mr. Mare quickly switches from being about the man with the growth, to orbiting around the miniature being that is born from his body. As we witness him go about his daily chores of polishing the man’s giant shoes and sweeping his floors, we experience his infatuation with his host growing and though the film always maintains its unsettling tone, there are unexpected moments of tenderness within.
“I wanted to make a surrealistic movie about how someone falls in love”, Toth reveals as we discuss her motivation when making Mr. Mare. If that was her main aim, it certainly feels like she succeeded. Even outside of the unusual premise of her short, the dialogue-free, measured pacing makes it a short that stands out due to its approach and we haven’t even touched on Toth’s unmistakable aesthetic yet.
The contrast between the design of her characters is an interesting detail in her aesthetic.
A hand-drawn animation, the style is instantly recognisable as Toth’s – we touched on her aesthetic when we featured both her earlier shorts The Age of Curious and Superbia – while still managing to feel fresh and not just a reproduction of an already tried and tested approach. Full of texture, with a surprisingly tactile feel for a 2D animation, the character design was a particular favourite element of mine, especially the contrast between the ‘handsome man’ and his infatuated housemate – one chiselled and refined, the other lumpy and disproportionate.
“We follow the relationship of an oddly codependent pair”
A surreal chamber play with an unnerving and often claustrophobic feel, Toth should be congratulated for imbuing any sense of relatability within her film, but it’s there for anyone with an experience of unrequited love. “We follow the relationship of an oddly codependent pair”, the director explains when describing her film, before adding that her tiny man “doesn’t understand how he should be loved by his object of desire”. The situation is strange, but the themes oddly identifiable.
Having followed her work since she was an RCA graduate back in 2013, Mr. Mare is the third film (and probably my favourite) from Luca we’ve featured on S/W. With her work picking up nominations at Berlin and Cannes and awards at Annecy, she is a filmmaker who always excites and intrigues us at S/W, we can’t wait to see what surprises she has planned for her next film.