La otra forma

In Diego Felipe Guzman’s La otra forma, the circle and the curved line are truly subversive geometries. Dialogue-free but with an excellent sound design totally integrated into the story, this animated film presents a future where every being is moulded to fit a world composed by straight lines and angles. Like a nightmarish plastic surgery gone awry, everything in La otra forma is squared to fit the prevalent social order: faces, bodies, shoes – but also fireworks, traffic lights, numbers and even clouds. The hero, Pedro Prensa, lives literally with a press squashing his head until, one day, he accidentally discovers that reality might not be so flat after all.

Lovers of science fiction and dystopian universes will recognise a decent number of well-digested influences: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, John Carpenter’s They Live (1989), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Alan Parker’s The Wall (1982) – not to mention the video game Tetris. With extreme visual consistency and infinite care, La otra forma invites us to reflect on the perils of indoctrination by emphasising the connection between inner and outer realities, between subjective perception and the external world. Fortunately, hope exists, and it looks like an acid trip of indomitable serpentine forms aching to break open.

– Cristina Álvarez López