Nim­ic

A grumpy New York con­cert cel­list played by Matt Dil­lon is the flum­moxed star of an eerie new short by Greek film­mak­er Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his reg­u­lar scribe, Efthymis Filippou.

It sees Dillon’s fam­i­ly man wake up, boil an egg, head off to orches­tra prac­tice and then, on his way back home, he asks a woman (Daphne Patakia) on the sub­way if she has the time. Instead of answer­ing his ques­tion, she mim­ics him, and asks him if he has the time. But it doesn’t end there, as she fol­lows him home, doing exact­ly as he does, to the point where she enters his house and claims to be the moth­er of his chil­dren and part­ner to his bemused wife (Susan Elle).

The film offers a show­case for some impres­sive, alien­at­ing fish-eye lens work, as sub­ur­ban street cor­ners are splayed out via sweep­ing (if sur­gi­cal­ly crisp) pans. These visu­al dis­tor­tions mark a nod to Lan­thi­mos’ mas­ter and muse, Stan­ley Kubrick, and the way he shoots the main apart­ment loca­tion con­tains remark­able echoes to the ​‘intel­lec­tu­al’ apart­ment that Alex and his Droogs break into in A Clock­work Orange.

It’s a chilly, vague­ly incon­se­quen­tial minia­ture that feels like Lan­thi­mos and his cohorts are work­ing through a poten­tial fea­ture con­cept to see if there’s any legs for some­thing a lit­tle more weighty. Weird­ly, even though the film itself doesn’t real­ly offer much on its own terms apart from some bone-dry dead­pan­ning, you do think that the metaphor of not being able to pre­vent your­self from being replaced is the sort of thing you could stretch to absurd lengths.

Nim­ic also touch­es on ideas of per­for­mance as a nat­ur­al rit­u­al of pub­lic life, and it’s prob­a­bly more suc­cess­ful and intrigu­ing than Lan­thi­mos’ third fea­ture, Alps. So def­i­nite­ly work a look.