Reseñas de la crítica

Nimic is super-short, more like an art piece. And yet it’s completely satisfying. None of Lanthimos’s films offers simple endings, answers or whatever the hell ‘closure’ means nowadays. Obviously indebted to Dostoevsky and Kafka, Nimic takes the simplest existential idea – what if everything in my life is meaningless? – and does a little riff on it.

Nimic feels like a mind-bending game in which you’re not quite sure what the rules are. By this I mean that anything could happen, as conventional logic is done away with. It is a condensed thriller, playfully absurd, that feels as if it is always on the verge of tipping into horror.

It’s a short, sharp shock of what makes Lanthimos’s films so compelling, and deserves to sit alongside his longer films as an equal and valued addition to the oeuvre.

The cast’s stoicism heightens the sense of foreboding (another signature trope in Lanthimos’ cinematic world) and the camera works in favour of this horror-creation. Playing subtly with the concepts of artificiality and truth, Nimic stands as a meta-narrative that references itself with sadistic glee, in a vicious cycle that could go on forever.

It’s a chilly, vaguely inconsequential miniature that feels like Lanthimos and his cohorts are working through a potential feature concept to see if there’s any legs for something a little more weighty.

Nimic is a very fun short film, that plays with tropes of the thriller and horror genre, stretching them into the absurd. Like his previous work, this short film is unsettling in the way that it challenges the conventional, pulling its protagonist, and the viewers, out of their comfort zones.

There is scant dialogue in the piece, but a score of discordant strings, overly stylised acting and that ubiquitous fisheye lens infuses every scene with an off-putting menace.