Spoilers ahead.
First and foremost, Nimic is about thievery.
The latest offering in the Yorgos Lanthimos roster (reaching Indian audiences more than a year after its release thanks to MUBI) is a bitingly short film – because 12 minutes of intimate camerawork, snappy cuts and blaring background scores are all this director needs to tell a broad, sprawling tale of the alienation.
Co-written by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, and based on an idea by David Kolbusz, Nimic follows a cellist who encounters a stranger on a subway ride, a meeting which sets the story in motion and has mind-bending consequences for them both. Exploring the gradual intermingling of their lives over the span of a tautly written day, with not one extraneous dialogue or frame, is the unenviable feat this film aspires to achieve.
It opens with the notes of a meaty cello – an instrument which later occupies centre stage in the story – and Matt Dillon’s character, a man going about his morning routine, cooking eggs, having breakfast with his family, and going to orchestra practice. While returning, he takes a seat in the metro and asks the woman seated opposite him for the time.
Her face of manic glee sparks the conflict.
Daphne Patakia, credited solely as ‘the Mimic’, repeats his own question to him. What ensues is a nerve-wracking narrative where the woman tails this cellist, enters his home, confronts his wife alongside him, and echoes all his words and actions until she completely replaces his role in the family, displacing him from the minds of his former wife and children.
The film closes on the cellist sitting in the metro again, opposite a teenager who asks him for the time. His glee mimics that of the woman who sat in the same spot one day ago.
The brute strength of the script is delivered through many technical masteries, but the middle act – after the exit from the subway– is a wonderful case in point.
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The editors, Dominic Leung and Yorgos Mavropsaridis, flex all their chops here, in perhaps one of the slowest chase sequences ever set to film (with the exception of 2017’s The Last Jedi – sorry, Rian Johnson). The cellist’s walking pace hastens with the woman’s behind him, the clatter of her heels on the pavement merging with the bustle in the metropolitan street. As he begins to jog, she jogs with him; and a quickly cut sequence of tense background music leads into a domestic space, primed for all the terrifying goodness we came here for.
The editing works masterfully, alternating between slow, wide-shot pans and rapid closeups on Patakia and Dillon. Susan Elle, the cellist’s wife and the only other dominant presence in the film, is often regarded through low-angles, her confusion mounting our sense of horror, as her inability to identify her partner (a scene sold by the spectacular performances of Sara Lee, Eugena Lee and Rowan Kay as the children) unsteadies our already-tremulous grip on the plot.
The Mimic’s heels become a dominant motif, bookending the closing credits. The credits themselves are a microcosm of the film’s thesis: every cast/crew name that appears borrows a letter from the one above it, tumbling downwards in an endless chain of disappearing characters leaving blank spots in an otherwise empty frame. Each name mimics and steals from its predecessor. Horror in desolation.
The cello serves as an effective example of diegetic music – music that is simultaneously used as background score and plot device. We open the film with thick notes ringing very Kubrick-esque- classical music loud and galore – and slowly realise that dexterity at this instrument is a key marker of how well the ‘Mimic’ has acclimatised to the life they stole. Patakia’s character is unsure at first, playing choppy, clunky, off-tune notes for the entirety of the third act’s (short) performance.
But a relieved smile breaks out on her face as the audience – consisting of her new family too –applauds the concert, cheering her entry into her new home.
The very last shot is a telling one. Preceded by a dream-like sequence imitating the tone, pace and visuals of the first few minutes, it cements her new role in this family. The camera slowly shifts focus from a wall behind her – the stranger she was one day ago – to her face, never letting her out of the frame for a second. As she chews her egg and eyes her wife and kids, we know that she has at last acclimatised.
The film speaks to metropolitan alienness, the sense of being drone-like cogs of a gigantic industrially aloof 21st century society, one which endows us all with the pleasant feeling of being expendable, replaceable, and without human worth to the institutions we contribute to. The last space where we consider ourselves unique and effectual – the unit of family – is also combusted by Lanthimos’s screenplay.
Trailing Dillon’s vacant face, unresponsive to surrounding stimuli, circulating a dull impersonal routine with zero investment until its very existence is threatened (does this person matter to anyone if even his family can’t recognise his face?) is a warning. The woman who steals his life invades our last refuge – our homes and bedrooms, a penetration we won’t pre-empt or subvert unless we entwine the personal with the political, digging to the root of the circumstances that allow such a breach.
Nimic is a genre-melange helmed by a director in solid control over his craft, executing this amidst critical darlings like The Favourite and The Lobster, proving his deftness at diverse dramas. And if we turn a blind eye to the very question that enables this narrative, “Do you have the time?” (yes actually, everybody does these days with the smartphone in their pocket), viewers can tune in for one of the most riveting and nail-biting short films released in the past few years, compressing a giant conflict within a timespan that should be an inspiration to writers and creators everywhere.
Udbhav Seth is a third-year student of English Literature at Hindu College, aspiring to one day be a full-time novelist and poet. Until then, however, he must settle with wallowing on YouTube, flailing at the piano and ranting on social media. You can find him at @udbhavtheseth on Instagram and udbhavseth.wordpress.com