Crumbs (2015)

directed by Miguel Llansó
Spain, Ethiopia, Finland (not sure where Finland comes in though)
68 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So due to a very poor choice of words, I thought this was going to be an entirely different movie than it actually is. When the synopsis refers to the main character as "figurine-sized", my interpretation of that was something along the lines of A Town Called Panic, I.E. that the main character was literally going to be a stop-motion figurine. But as it happens our protagonist is just a regular guy who happens to be short due to some skeletal deformities and I am very bad at interpreting metaphor. Also that's a bit insulting.

Anyway. I'm actually somewhat thankful for that mixup because it meant I was expecting a silly movie and instead got jarred by the unexpected pessimism of it all. The opening paragraphs establish a narrative about the end of civilization that feels horrifyingly possible; an apocalypse which comes about not due to any action taken to bring it but due to no action having been taken to prevent it. Humanity kind of bores itself to death. Everyone finds themselves disinterested in prolonging human civilization and so eventually we all just fade away. It's simple and you might scoff at it at first but it's easy to see the next generation or two becoming more and more disdainful or at least doubtful of the future of humanity.

These points about the end of society are well-established and understandable, but that's about the only thing that's understandable in Crumbs. It doesn't take a simple approach to its story and instead gives us a weird ball of random occurrences and surrealism mixed with notes about the evolution of culture after its context has been stripped away. Parts like the selling of plastic trinkets with epic stories attached to them about what they were supposedly used for before "the war" make sense, parts like the main character going on a journey away from the house he shares with his lover only to end up inside a fixture from that same house make much less sense.

But it all does come together pretty solidly in the end. I seldom see surreal movies like this where the emotional element of the plot is heavily emphasized despite the lack of events that a viewer could immediately connect with. But I guess if you look at it in a certain way, a lot of the important features of this movie do have analogues in today's environment: there's a derelict spaceship floating up in the sky that everybody has rumors about the eventual return of, which is like people looking to higher authorities than themselves that rarely actually give them an answer, and the trotting-out of cultural motifs attached to toy swords and action figures is basically what toy collectors do today. I probably could have watched more than 68 minutes of this but for something only a little over an hour long it gets the job done really well.