23/05/2023 - A schizophrenic and eloquent depiction of human duality

Balázs Turai’s festival darling Amok carried on winning hearts at Anifilm in Liberec with its wicked commentary on modern love in the age of online dating

With great confidence and success, Hungarian animation director Balázs Turai’s dark and inventive short Amok is marching its way around the festival circuit and, after winning the Best Short Film award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2022, as it did at the 2022 Sarajevo Film Festival  and 2023 Clermont-Ferrand ISFF, to name just two, it finally landed at Anifilm in the Czech city of Liberec. Turai previously held a masterclass at the 2022 Animest International Animation Festival and spoke about his professional journey with Oona Darie, a fellow participant in the GoCritic! program.

The film is a wicked commentary on modern love in the age of online dating, served by an abundance of candy-like visuals and pop culture references. Like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Clyde, the protagonist in Amok, must learn to live with his foul alter ego: a gnome sabotaging every romantic relationship he embarks upon.

Amok is a festival darling for good reason. The film quenches our thirst for devilish cynicism (don’t tell us you don’t know what we’re talking about), wrapped up in a shiny, decorative reflection of how screwed up we actually are.

Consider the opening scene. Clyde is ready to pop the question. His fiancée Tina is eager to say “yes”. A true idyll! But just before he asks the all-important question, an evil, half-naked gnome appears out of nowhere and casts a spell on him, causing him to drive the car they’re in off a cliff.

Despite being seriously crippled, Clyde survives and starts anew. We see him grieving for Tina, yet it’s hard to believe the sincerity of Clyde’s emotions. It’s a feeling of relief masquerading as despair. It can’t be a coincidence that the dwarf appears just as Clyde’s relationships are getting serious and when a ring enters the equation. A flashback of his childhood, viewed through the perspective of a golden ring, reveals a doomed marriage – his parents bickered endlessly. Again, Gollum and Clyde share feelings of love and hate for a golden piece of jewellery.

Turai’s style and tone are blunt – he’s shameless in his use of the most common Freudian and Jungian clichés to outline Clyde’s commitment issues. Intentionally avoiding over-intellectualization, Amok substitutes any sign of elegant subtlety with exaggeration and straightforwardness, which works wonderfully in the film’s favour. The characters are deliberately and purposefully banal, including Tina and Clyde, who are respectively a first love interest and a typical bachelor. The gnome is evil but lovable, and the background characters all seem perfectly ordinary: a pretty boy, a homeless person, a dog walker, the townspeople, etc. However, Clyde's second love interest, Ariel, proves to a banal character capable of deviation. She’ll be the one who tames the ever-present manifestation of Clyde’s inner demons and past traumas.

There’s a wonder-woman hiding beneath Ariel’s mermaid-like, blood-red hair and seeming fragility. Ariel dives after Clyde as well as the Gnome, proving to be a match for the latter. Amok's Ariel winks at Disney's Little Mermaid, but she’s far more than just a surface-level imitation.

Amok is a visually expressive film, like a music video on acid, reminding the viewer that love is one hell of a trip. The screen is flooded with splashes of brash, clashing neon colours which add to the gloomy mood. And the soundtrack complements this visual extravaganza, moving and guiding the storyline forwards. Techno rhythms alternate with the kind of music you’d listen to in a smoky bar while drinking calvados alone.

“The music came before the film,” Turai revealed in an interview for ‘Animation Scoop’. He also added that the songs by French composer and media artist Benjamin Efrati inspired Amok’s story when it was in semi-existent form.

Dynamically paced, dialogue-free and avoidant of any philosophical side remarks, the film is a madly fun caricature that’s easy to watch. In this Tinder (still trending?) love universe where so many relationship stories and mishaps depend on the rapid judgements made during first impressions, Clyde and Ariel are torn between an eagerness to settle down and an urge to run like hell from all manner of romantic milestones.

The film delivers wider truths about avoiding responsibility and justifying our cowardice with the all-too-easy excuse that “the darker side of our personality is to blame”. It views human duality and narcissism as normal schizophrenic states which we should accept in ourselves and in others. Clyde learns to embrace his shadier self by letting Ariel and her shadier self in. Though throwing the ring away does also seem to help…

Amok draws parallels between love-life decisions which closely mirror our moral compasses, traumas, and the inner workings of our minds. As it turns out, both monsters - Clyde and the Gnome (Gollum and Sméagol, if you will) – learn to reach a compromise, sharing a shoulder to cry on and a balcony to recline on, and learning to speak as one.

Credits
Title Amok
Country Hungary, Romania
Sales agent Boddah
Year 2022
Directed by Balázs Turai
Screenplay by Balázs Turai