20th Century Women
118'
USA
IFFR 2017
Marc Herpoux and Hervé Admar earned a reputation by subverting genres, twisting thrillers into complex, personal and bizarre quests. In Beyond the Walls, they play with horror tropes while sketching the portrait of a woman.
Lisa is a single doctor living an austere life. She inherits a house from her next-door neighbour, a man whose body has been discovered thirty years after his demise. Behind the wallpaper, she finds strange corridors and rooms leading to other times and places, with more or less pleasant inhabitants. This miniseries, borrowing from gothic horror, Alice in Wonderland, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves or even the Resident Evil games, is a surreal, striking and cryptic work in which Lisa’s journey is also a radical psychoanalysis. Beyond the Walls is the kind of absorbing film which works better on the big screen than on television, its original medium. At times, its beautifully composed form is more captivating than the plot – unlike your usual TV series.
Season 1, episodes 1, 2 and 3.
IFFR 2017