“The film poses more questions than it answers, leaving the audience bewildered but also beguiled by its beautiful 2D animation.”

When Hélène and a group of other young activists launch a violent attack on a wealthy landowner, Hélène backs out as her friends all get shot. She runs into the woods, but also into a strange world where a young girl is roaming around asking her to consider her choices, and where one of her accomplices, Manon, reappears to dog Hélène about her convictions. The deeper she wanders into the wilderness, the stranger its world gets and the more off-balance nature becomes. Can Hélène face the consequences of her actions, and is she able to turn back time in this wondrous environment? And what is in that letter that was given to her by one of her male compadres while confessing that he loved her?

In his fourth feature-length film, Canadian animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière delves into some big themes like social upheaval, the changing climate, and the strength of our convictions through a cryptic story. He has centered it around the friendship and loyalty of a young woman who is maybe not willing to pay the same high price for her commitment to the cause that others are. Love, as always, also plays a big role in Hélène’s journey, as Manon entices her to go back and redo the attack maybe not for their cause, but to save her lover Marc. To be fair, the specific cause that the group is fighting for remains vague, holding the middle between class warfare and eco-terrorism. What exactly the older, wheelchair-bound woman that they go after has done to provoke such an act of violence is also unclear, although this will come more into focus late in the film when we get a repeat of the violent attack on her, this time with Hélène participating. La mort n’existe pas remains too vague and incomprehensible to make a solid argument on what it all means, in particular the large chunk of the film’s relatively short runtime that Hélène spends in the forest being haunted by Manon and the little girl, the emotional disconnect as a result keeping the audience at arm’s length.

Which isn’t to say that La mort n’existe pas isn’t intriguing or worth trying to put its puzzle together. Most of what we see in that large middle section seems to occur in Hélène’s head, though at what moment is unclear. Is the first version of the attack real, and the later one imagined, or is the first one her envisioning of what would happen if the attack occurred without her, and thus the film involves her convincing herself that she must join in so her lover will not die?

The film poses more questions than it answers, leaving the audience bewildered but also beguiled by its beautiful 2D animation. Created mostly in tones of soft green and yellow, La mort n’existe pas‘ style is simple yet evocative, especially in its more fantastical moments in which nature disrupts the world as if an earthquake has struck; it’s in these moments that the film finds itself in that same inexplicable realm that makes Miyazaki films tick, the difference in animation style be damned. The wondrous nature of it all (and the short runtime; the film is barely 70 minutes) gives fans of animation a lot to enjoy, but those looking for a more profound message might be groping in the dark for a while. Perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing.