TIFF 2020: Kill It and Leave This Town
Toronto International Film Festival 2020An ambitious fifteen-year-long undertaking from the famed Polish animation director Mariusz Wilczyński, Zabij to i wyjedz z tego miasta (better known as Kill It and Leave This Town) premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival to much praise and is now touring the fall festival circuit, receiving its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival to much acclaim. It showcases a uniquely experimental vision that is unlike any mainstream animated picture of the last decade.
From its first frame, its distinct visual style shines through, creating an intense atmosphere in which the crudely drawn animation is paired with brilliant sound design to propagate a hauntingly grotesque nature throughout the entire film. What could be best described as a series of fragments loosely connected by an autobiographical story, it begins by following a fictional version of Wilczyński but soon evolves into something closer to David Lynch’s early experimental films mixed with the liberal structure of intimate scenes in the films of Terrence Malick. However, to perfectly capture the tone of the film, we need look no further than the surreal work of 18th century artists like Salvador Dali, Marc Chagal and Marcel Duchamp. The way in which Kill It and Leave This Town frames its subjects and blocks them in regards to their surroundings leads to the creation of multi layered set pieces that showcase the incredible attention to detail that went into every frame.
Whilst the expression of deeper, more complex themes are present, they are muddled because of the director’s need to push boundaries with its experimental nature and risky structure. Narratively, the film is ambiguous at its best and an incoherent mess at its worse. Whilst its individual scenes have a clear beginning, middle and end, Kill It and Leave This Town, as a whole, lacks any strong connecting threads which ultimately holds it back from being accessible to most audiences around the world.
Yet, that may be exactly what Mariusz Wilczyński was hoping to achieve, and if his goal was to create a true audiovisual experience that transcends the limitations of both animated pictures and experimental cinema, then Kill It and Leave This Town can be deemed a success. Though it might leave the audience in a state of perplexity with little clue as to the narrative of the film, Kill It and Leave this Town is indubitably one of the boldest and most confident films of the year, resulting in a film that is able to meld the best aspects of each art form into one and somehow captures the feelings of surreal dreams better than any other film at the festival.