(Paramount)

The new stop-motion animation film from directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson is a chilling, nightmarish character study. But its central premise is one that I am loathe to spoil for the viewer. I went into the film cold (I had barely even remembered it was animated), and the filmmakers seem to prefer that the film be seen that way; when asked what the movie is about, Kaufman replies, “about an hour and a half.”

This is an accurate measurement, but it’s also an apt theme: Anomalisa is about a passage of time that is dreary, bored, and lost. Fortunately, this film about existential ennui is a fascinating and frightening dream, like a stop-motion animation that traumatized you in grade school and is now played upon the troubles of adulthood. Anyone who wants to go into the film cold should stop reading here and just go see the movie. Although I’ve linked a trailer at the end of this review, don’t bother watching—it makes the film sound like some kind of life-affirming pap.

Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is a customer service specialist, author of the book, How May I Help You Help Them? Yet he clearly needs help. Taking a cab to a Cincinnati hotel where he’s checking in for a conference, he looks like a lost, alienated puppet. He has a wife and young son at home and is getting ready to deliver a speech at the conference, but he’s haunted by the ghost of an old flame who lives in town.

The film’s conceit is revealed early on, though not so you realize what it is. As he’s listening to choral music on an early iPod, we see the music cued but it doesn’t seem to match what we hear, in voices that sound off. As Michael speaks to his wife on the phone, she sounds like a man. In fact, she sounds just like the cab driver (when we see Michael thinking about her, she looks like the cab driver), and like everyone else Michael encounters. His own professional approach is to “Look at everyone as if they are a unique individual,” but he sees and hears everyone in the world as the same individual.

Until Lisa (the voice of Jennifer Jason Leigh) comes along. A sales rep from Ohio, she seems like a perfectly ordinary woman, but to Michael, she is the only individual with her own voice and look in a sea of people who are all alike.

As we see Michael and Lisa hit it off, we feel sympathy for Lisa but not necessarily for Michael. Sure, he may have found a woman whom he believes is his soul mate, but he sees her from the arrogant position that everyone else looks and sounds alike. The stop-motion animation adds an eerie undercurrent to a dark vision in which everyone’s face and voice are essentially the same—and they are, all of them voiced by Tom Noonan, whose generic tone is the kind of voice you might expect everyone to have if everyone sounded the same. Anomalisa is an unsettling film, one that doesn’t look or sound like anything else.

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Anomalisa
Directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman
Written by Charlie Kaufman
With the voices of David Thewliss, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tom Noonan
Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language
Running time 90 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.