17/07/2026 - Niles Atallah’s surreal, uncanny short animation imagines a haunting dystopian paradise that foreshadows our future

Written and directed by Chilean-US director Niles Atallah, Merrimundi is a 20-minute stop-motion short that portrays a vision of a twisted utopia within a cycle of reproduction. The film world-premiered in the shorts competition at Venice and contended for the international prize at Žilina’s Fest Anča, in Slovakia.

Set against a dark, flat background, a detached toy-like cherub is manipulated by several puppeteers covered in black cloaks. Soon after, a swirl of paper wires above the cherub’s head conducts consciousness into its body. With its composite physique – somewhat recalling the imagery of The Substance (2024) by Coralie Fargeat – the puppet becomes a sort of multilingual machine that transitions from a black-and-white foreground to a polychromatic cosmos. In this continuous cycle of regeneration, images of creation and destruction are blended as an ever-changing symphony, accompanied by religious-sounding background music.

Attallah employs a weirdcore aesthetic style, adding a gothic and dadaist layer that expands the film’s visual storytelling. Immersed in a grotesque atmosphere, flower-shaped cherubs with hollowed eyes and mouths reproduce in various shapes and colours, experiencing their birth and decay almost simultaneously. As their growth becomes irresistibly wild, the film equates chaos with rebellion, breaking apart from the world of sameness.

To illustrate the looming future implied in Merrimundi, the director also draws inspiration from oriental religious iconography and glitch art, bringing a hybridity of forms that invites multiple interpretations. Some images may be elusive to viewers due to the short span of time in which they are shown, but the expressive visualisation and peculiar ethos of the film are sharp and impressive.

Through the combination of mysteriousness, puppetry and a quirky score, Attallah creatively composes a polyphonic ode to a world dominated by precarity and rapid changes. Its experimental method indicates how certain forms of ideology are coded in people’s minds. This not only serves as a contemporary metaphor for our current existential crisis, but also envisions a future that may be inadvertently and negatively defined by homogenisation and reincarnation.