Every­thing Will Be OK – first-look review

The films of Cam­bo­di­an film­mak­er Rithy Panh have long addressed humanity’s capac­i­ty for evil, but in Every­thing Will Be OK he exam­ines (amongst oth­er things) whether or not the same capa­bil­i­ties exist with­in ani­mal soci­ety. Using the same style of elab­o­rate hand-craft­ed minia­ture mod­el-work found in many of the pro­lif­ic filmmaker’s pre­vi­ous projects, in his lat­est film Panh shifts his per­spec­tive some­what, telling a spec­u­la­tive sto­ry about a world where ani­mals have tak­en over the world and enslaved humanity.

Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh’s par­ents, sib­lings, and a num­ber of his rel­a­tives all died in Khmer Rouge labour camps pri­or to his escape from Cam­bo­dia. Under­stand­ably, many of his films — such as S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) or the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed The Miss­ing Pic­ture (2013) — have addressed the hor­rors that occured in his home coun­try, using vary­ing but always cre­ative means to work through his own family’s sto­ry and broad­er relat­ed nation­al issues. This his­to­ry is still present in Every­thing Will Be Ok, but it plays out in the back­ground of a cen­tral nar­ra­tive that uses the ques­tion of whether or not the new ani­mal rulers will repeat the same mis­takes humans made dur­ing their peri­od of pri­ma­cy as a means to explore humanity’s propen­si­ty towards com­mit­ting atrocities.

The film is idio­syn­crat­ic and sur­re­al, and as a result, fair­ly dif­fi­cult to describe effec­tive­ly. Over a series of intri­cate­ly craft­ed tableaux, the mobs of mon­keys, boars, and lions that have tak­en charge of the plan­et are staged con­gre­gat­ing with­in minia­ture land­scapes. With­in these, the ani­mals are gen­er­al­ly seen watch­ing giant screens dis­play­ing archival mate­r­i­al col­lect­ed from across 20^th-cen­tu­ry human his­to­ry, much of which involves vio­lence, death, and bru­tal­i­ty. Laid over the top is poet­ic nar­ra­tion voiced by Rebec­ca Marder and co-writ­ten by Panh with actress Agnès Séné­maud and writer Christophe Bataille. Mus­ing on every­thing from art, cin­e­ma, tech­nol­o­gy, human nature, and polit­i­cal his­to­ry, this nar­ra­tion is intel­lec­tu­al and wide-rang­ing, but often also dif­fi­cult to process, feel­ing loose and ram­bling to the point that it occa­sion­al­ly feels like the French orig­i­nal lan­guage script may have been mistranslated.

The mod­el land­scape setups are beau­ti­ful and the crafts­man­ship of the minia­ture ani­mals is always impres­sive. Some scenes resem­ble imagery seen in the ani­mat­ed films made in recent years by Wes Ander­son, whilst oth­ers dis­play the hand­made touch found in the work of Aard­man Ani­ma­tions. Every­thing Will Be Ok is dis­tinct from this sort of ani­mat­ed film in two major ways. While the film’s sub­ject mat­ter is more com­plex and obvi­ous­ly much dark­er, the film also fea­tures very lit­tle motion. These sequences instead resem­ble a his­tor­i­cal muse­um dio­ra­ma, fea­tur­ing sta­tionery lay­outs which are brought to life by rich, involv­ing sound design mix­ing string music with an array of squarks, squeals, oinks, and oth­er ani­mal noises.

Heavy on metaphor and allu­sion, the ideas explored in the film can some­times seem vague and search­ing, or, read less gen­er­ous­ly, impre­cise, unfo­cused, and too loose in exact mean­ing. Some of Panh’s pre­vi­ous films were affect­ing pre­cise­ly because they were so per­son­al. This is not to say that he shouldn’t widen his focus, but by reach­ing for some­thing more uni­ver­sal, the direc­tor seems some­what dis­tanced from the top­ics dis­cussed in his film’s free-asso­cia­tive nar­ra­tion. The end result, while cer­tain­ly imag­i­na­tive, feels over­stuffed and over­stretched; the film has lots of ideas but no clear direction.

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