TIFF 09: THE APE Review

A man awakes and finds himself prone on the tiles of the bathroom floor. He is alone and covered in blood. He panics but the blood is not his and so he washes and leaves the scene as quickly as he can. He finds his bike outside and rides to the garage where he picks up his car. It needs new brakes. His mother calls. Then he arrives at work, where he is told off for being late. Again. Welcome to the world of Jesper Ganslandt's The Ape.

A sort of Dogme-style, minimalist thriller, Ganslandt's film offers the viewer a puzzle, an enigma. Entirely devoid of exposition or any sort of plot device designed to feed the audience answers, The Ape simply drops you without warning into a horrible situation - clearly something has gone very wrong here - with someone very likely to have been intimately involved and then literally follows its unknown protagonist through the rest of his day, leaving the viewer to puzzle out what is happening and why. It's an odd approach, one that works so remarkably well that it is sure to be copied all around the world.

The Ape succeeds because it refuses to allow passive viewing.  This is film as active problem solving, it forces the audience to sit up and take notice.  Information is teased out, much left to supposition and speculation and all of it shot through with unease and dread first as you try to discover who the blood belongs to and next why and then what Olle Sarri will do next in the lead role of Krister.

This is not a film that can be discussed without veering straight into spoiler territory. It is a film that demands to be experienced and experienced as fresh and naive as possible. The less you know the better off you are. All you need to know is that with Ganslandt behind the camera and Sarri in front of it you are in very sure hands indeed.