Fantasia 09 Review: CANARY
[Our thanks to Lauren Baggett for the following.]
I've attended Fantasia for five years now, and CANARY is the only film I've ever seen that was met at the end with resounding silence. It's also one of those films that makes the festival for me - the sort of film that's blazingly original, but probably won't get that much attention outside of the festival circuit. In this case, I really hope that I'm wrong, as CANARY really deserves some time in the spotlight. It's a
provocative, truly stunning piece of work, and director Alejandro Adams is one to watch.
A subtler film about organ redistribution will probably never be made. I honestly don't see how it could be done. As it is, CANARY often comes close to becoming more deliberately obscure than subtle, but the film walks the fine line with grace and aplomb. There are no voiceovers explaining this brave new world here, no expository dialogue that spreads everything out before you for easy consumption. The closest CANARY gets to explaining its world is a darkly comic PR firm meeting where eerily earnest employees pound out a publicity plan for Canary Industries, "the Coke of organ redistribution". In addition to the marketing firm, CANARY also follows the chatty members of a medical clinic, a news team that blunders away from the truth as much as they blunder towards it, and countless people going about their multilingual lives (the film hosts some unsubtitled Vietnamese, German, and other languages). The main character, if anyone in CANARY could qualify as such, is a mute, nameless "organ redistribution agent", a young woman with dark curls and a white Canary jumpsuit. Her job, or so it seems, is to watch those who have received new organs from Canary Industries, slipping into their homes or following them through the mall with ease. If they are judged to be violating the terms of their very long contracts, then their organs are redistributed: our wordless Canary agent drags them into the back of her white van and replaces their liver with a mysterious substance that resembles blue Jell-O. What happens to these people after their abrupt Jell-O transplants is unclear, and CANARY is unconcerned with their fates; the wordless agent is next seen violating the privacy of new hapless organ holders. There's an attempt at explaining the workings of Canary Industries and what may be happening behind the scenes, but this information never comes from a truly reliable source. The state of American health care, the creep of corporations into daily life, the complicity of the media: CANARY touches on all of these, with no sympathy for anyone and no quarter taken. It isn't all satiric, but there are some gems of blacker than black humor here, especially when we see a Canary clinic employee lecturing a barely comprehending toddler about how she needs to behave or else they'll take her organs away. Most of the time, however, we're a fly on the wall of a very bleak, very familiar world.
As CANARY lures the viewer closer into its version of the world around us, questions endlessly crop up. How can the requisition agent follow people, often in their own homes and out in public, without being noticed? Couldn't technological surveillance do the trick? Why does everyone ignore the female agent, yet Justin, another agent, is the life of the party? What is that blue jelly, anyway? These issues aren't due to incompetence or oversight, however; it's clear that Alejandro Adams has a very particular vision. There are some contradictions and leaps in logic, but that merely adds to Canary's tone, that of a quiet nightmare. Adams doesn't make the film easy for you, and while the viewer is left with more questions then answers by the film's chilling and delicate last scene, I never felt cheated or manipulated.
Hopefully CANARY will be seen by more appreciative audiences in the days to some. It's a sucker punch of a film, and its creator is a master in the making.
Review by Lauren Baggett
