Opiniões dos críticos

Throughout the film, the camera never moves, fixating instead on whatever activity is happening within the frame at a particular moment of the day. The stationary set-ups enhance The Strange Little Cat's theatrical undertones. Zürcher's lens does not provide a window into their world, but a view of their stage.

At once the scariest and funniest film of its year despite being neither a horror film nor an outright comedy, The Strange Little Cat is a compressed formal experiment that boasts some of the most evocative use of off-screen sound space this side of Bresson or Kiarostami.

Described by the director as a "chamber piece with a minimal plot," it is a work that makes a cunning monument of the performative gestures and musical qualities of everyday minutiae... Over a mere 72 minutes, private fears, unconsummated desires, imminent death, chaos, and entropy emerge within the film's carefully calibrated construction.

The choreography in front of the camera is intricate throughout: actors move across and around each other with a velocity and control that recalls Hal Hartley's frenetic stagings, but by employing stylized movement in a largely naturalistic atmosphere Zürcher's created his own brand of hypnotic dancelike unreality.

The size of this apartment is central to the pressure building unbearably within it. As is Zürcher's rigor in shooting it: he favors tight close-ups and medium shots crammed with bodies and limbs, the better to impress upon us a sense of these quarters as cramped, overcrowded, and painfully confined. It's suffocating, and naturally we want out: we want to see the pressure released.

We're just past the halfway mark of 2014, but I already have a clear favorite for best film of the year. The Strange Little Cat is only seventy-two minutes long, but what happens within that short span amounts to some of the most brilliantly realized filmmaking in recent memory. Each passing second and every inch of the frame of this film displays remarkable attention to minute details that build into an utterly original way of looking.

Many of the utterances—the chorus of byes ("Tschüss!"); the constant query of "Where's ———?"; Clara's coffeemaker-synched screams—ring sharply as the cacophonous sound track to the mundane chaos that seems to take over whenever blood ties gather. The noises produce a haunting echo in this uncanny valley, reverberating from character to spectator and back again.

The film's strength is in its rigor, its ability to distill moments in what appears to be real time and harness their underlying tensions without pausing, slowing down or speeding up: for Zürcher, it seems, space and time create their own dramas. This assemblage – referred to in the film's promotional materials as a "group portrait" – is a treasury of ineffable life fragments, certain to linger in memory long after they've mutated into something else.

Ramon Zürcher's miniature debut, The Strange Little Cat, is one of the most confident and unusual first features in recent memory... Writer-director-editor-sound-designer Zürcher is a rigorous formalist with a light, humane touch—a seeming contradiction in terms, though fitting for the director of such a paradoxical little movie.

Shooting from counterintuitive angles, Mr. Zürcher intensifies our familiarity with the space. Something as simple as a game of Connect Four becomes a source of suspense. Viewed one way, "The Strange Little Cat" is a movie about the constancy of home life against the passage of time.

Made by filmmaker Ramon Zürcher while he was still attending the German Film andTelevision Academy, this odd little wonder captures the delicate textures and shadowy half-secrets of family life, mapping them out in a mosaic of fragmented dialogue and half-poetic, half-prosaic images.

This German family drama isn't weird — at least not in the way that, say, David Lynch's Eraserhead is weird. There's no surreal imagery, no outré flights of fancy, no industrial thrum. Director Ramon Zürcher has instead taken the units of a fairly ordinary movie and assembled them in an unusual way, creating a uniquely beguiling cinematic rhythm. It feels as if he's reinventing the medium from the ground up, and if he hasn't yet wholly succeeded, that's no reason not to be excited.