Kill It and Leave This Town

There's so very much for us to try to take in here, and honestly, it's not the easiest to try to digest. Over the course of ninety minutes the dominant ethos is far-out arthouse surrealism that forgoes most any sense of cohesiveness, or a through-line, let alone reality, making it difficult at any moment to ascertain what the filmmaker's vision actually is. Amidst this bizarrerie we're further treated to violent and disturbing imagery, blood and gore, character designs that range from the recognizably human to the barely human, reflections on death, mortality, cruelty, and loneliness, and more. The style of animation is unquestionably simple on the face of it, yet is surprisingly varied and clever and belies a substantial amount of detail at times - shading, texture, fine lines and minutiae, color, lighting, and more. 'Kill it and leave this town' is a strange, abstruse experiment, but I'd be lying if I said it weren't well made and fascinating in and of itself.

Truthfully, for all that the picture offers up at one time or another, by and large it's so far-flung and disparate in its visions that even with a clear-cut premise provided from outside context it's hard to put together what Mariusz Wilczynski is doing. It seems to me that it's only in the last third of the length that a measure of unity of vision is established, and still the thoughts underlying some scenes elude me. Suffice to say that what one gets out of this will vary wildly from one viewer to the next, and I don't really know who I'd recommend it to except for those who are open to all the extremely wide possibilities of what cinema has to offer. It's not that I don't like this film, but only that I genuinely don't know what to make of it. Assumptions based on a modicum of outside context - that is, Wilczynski's own statements that it echoes how he keeps alive in his imagination those who he has lost - only get one so far. I think this is worth watching on its own merits, and in recognition of how much hard work went into it. I also think that unless you're a cinephile who is receptive to anything and everything that you may come across, 'Kill it and leave this town' is going to be something that's well beyond the capability of many audiences to sit with.