The Strange Little Cat

Nothing much happens. A cat makes a move and purrs. Someone is reprimanded for not tucking in his shirt.

"...a beautiful, mysterious, beguiling cinematic doodle, and an absolute master class in mise-en-scène, unfolding in odd, fragmented frames and precisely choreographed movement within those frames."

From the very first shot, we are clued in that there are depths of strangeness to be plumbed in even the smallest and most banal interactions.

A radically disorienting, disarmingly odd first feature from Ramon Zürcher.

Zürcher's talent for illuminating the specific also extends to his precise arrangement of bodies in rooms and hallways; the various entrances to and exits from the kitchen, for example, reveal a tightly, yet never fussily so, controlled choreography.

One of the most confident and unusual first features in recent memory.

Zürcher's ability to convey this structural balance in tandem with the emotional counterbalance presumably inherent in age is what makes The Strange Little Cat an oddly beautiful mystery, brilliantly alive.

A sweet little film playfully depicting the everyday of a family's life, and the director does it assuredly and affectionately.

It's an enigma of a film, something so simple on the surface and yet every scene feels like something isn't quite right.

The Strange Little Cat is a film that prioritizes confinement, small movements within that confinement, and the unexpected alleviation of that confinement through imagination and memory.