The Strange Little Cat

A family gathering in a Berlin apartment on a radiant Saturday afternoon, replete with meal preparations, habitual comings and goings, the family dog—and of course, cat—sets the stage as these increasingly-teeming quotidian activities and bodies synthesize, gradually and gracefully, into an epic scale of balletic choreography, or otherwise an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. This astonishing first feature and graduate thesis film from filmmaker Ramon Zürcher, which was produced by his twin brother Silvan, is loosely inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It has garnered comparisons to the static frames of Chantal Ackerman; the complex movements and blocking of Jean Renoir; and the profundities of real life that performance can reveal, as shown to us by Robert Bresson—and yet manages to be something wholly unprecedented and unmatched. Every second of The Strange Little Cat’s scant 75-minute runtime unveils a precious part of an endlessly fascinating object of cinematic alchemy.

Image © DFFB