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Fantasia Fest 2025 Review) LA MORT N’EXISTE PAS Creates Something Beautiful, But Gets Lost in Its Own Forest

By: Professor Horror

There are films that feel like open invitations. And then there are films LA MORT N’EXISTE PAS, which feel like walking in on a conversation mid-sentence…a conversation that doesn’t necessarily want you there. Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s latest animated feature, which premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and screened at Fantasia 2025, is lush, layered, and deeply ambitious, but also meandering and emotionally opaque. I wanted to love it more than I did. And yet, there’s something undeniably compelling about watching a movie fail gloriously on its own terms.

Set in a surreal, post-revolutionary Quebec where ghostly wolves howl and memories bloom from the forest floor, LA MORT N’EXISTE PAS opens with fire...literally. A failed raid on a gilded estate ends in gunfire and loss. Hélène (Zeneb Blanchet), the film’s reluctant protagonist, survives by fleeing into the forest, leaving her comrades behind. Guilt stalks her in the form of Manon (Karelle Tremblay), a comrade-turned-spectral-guide who insists Hélène must return to the scene of the crime and witness the moment she ran. But this isn’t a simple story of betrayal and redemption. Dufour-Laperrière veers quickly away from plot and into poetry, and whether that poetry resonates may depend on how much abstraction you’re willing to embrace.

                                       

Visually, though? It’s a knockout. This is animation that doesn’t just tell a story, but it breathes it. Figures are drawn in bold outlines, filled with matte colors that shift in real-time, blending characters into their environments like camouflage. At one moment, Hélène is green, almost indistinguishable from the leaves around her. Later, she burns orange with firelight or fades to gray in a dreamlike memory. The style evokes the graphic novels of Charles Burns or Ugo Bienvenu, with heavy inking and a painterly texture that feels almost tactile. Even death is rendered beautifully: a sheep torn apart in the forest, then reassembled by unseen forces, becomes a symbol of eternal return as it appears violent, cyclical, and weirdly serene.

                                       

The animation is also remarkably political in its own right. Golden statues of wolves, which initially appear as symbols of power and wealth are eventually overtaken by vines, rotted by time and irrelevance. It's an ecological metaphor, but also a political one: nature will reclaim what violence builds. And for a film about revolution and cowardice, that's a haunting promise. But for all its symbolic weight and visual splendor, the film stumbles hard on narrative coherence and emotional accessibility. The pacing drifts. Scenes repeat. Dialogues (when they do occur) often feel self-satisfied or undercooked. Almost like we are witnessing snippets of a manifesto we weren’t invited to read. At times, the film feels like it’s listening to itself more than to the audience. I found myself wondering: who is this for? Is this a fable? A dream? A protest? Or just a beautifully rendered shrug? There’s certainly an emotional arc buried in the undergrowth with Hélène’s guilt, her refusal to fight, her longing for a second chance. But we rarely feel it. The film lingers too long in metaphor and not long enough in motivation. Characters appear, deliver cryptic lines, then vanish. We understand what the film wants us to feel, but we don’t quite get there. It’s all smoke, no fire.

                                        

And yet, it’s hard to write this film off entirely. There’s something noble in its failure. Almost like a revolutionary pamphlet left out in the rain, its ink smudged but its intent still legible. The score, a low thrum of ambient textures and elegiac chords, adds to the dreamlike mood. The ending, a looping return to the opening massacre, feels less like closure and more like haunting or a reminder that history (personal or political) rarely offers clean exits. LA MORT N’EXISTE PAS wants to say something urgent about activism, fear, and the price of inaction. But its voice gets lost in the woods. What we’re left with is a mood, a palette, a pulse. It’s beautiful. It’s ambitious. It’s frustrating. It’s like a protest sign painted by hand…uneven, heartfelt, and fluttering in the wind, half-legible but hard to ignore.