OTES?NEK

Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer is a cinematic alchemist of world renown, his grimoire an album of macabre visuals and disquieting juxtapositions. Here Svankmajer conjures up one of the creepier Brothers Grimm fairy tales and modernizes it into a morbidly humorous natal nightmare, intertwining his trademark stop-motion animation with live action. Baby fever takes on nasty dimensions when pretty Mrs. Horakova and her husband Karel can't conceive a child. In a world suddenly fecund with metaphors of infants, bodily fluids and fertility, Karel makes the mistake of carving an uprooted tree stump into a gnarled, doll-like wooden figure, and bringing it home. Bozenka, the young wife, goes quite insane, faking pregnancy (right down to imitation morning-sickness) whilst doting on the totem as though it were their flesh-and-blood offspring. Bozenka's obsession results in the “birth” of an inhuman monstrosity with an insatiable appetite. And only their apartment neighbor Alzbeta, a precocious little girl well-versed in both bedtime stories and sexual reproduction, realizes the terrible truth about the precious, ravenous baby “Otik” that the trembling couple try to keep out of sight. Bon appetit! (In Czech with English subtitles)