Calling this animated documentary anything less than the most beautiful delineation of two immutable truths of human existence - pain and death, would be a gross underestimation. At its conclusion, it won't be wrong to expect an overwhelming deluge of emotions, but one which is cathartic in nature. Nguyen deserves further appreciation for interacting with a film type, an animated documentary, which anyway is an ignored field of filmmaking, and thus does not boast of too many reliable fixed templates to turn to for inspiration. Yet, the filmmaker manages to offer the most seamless union of animation and live action.

 The film shares the story of three characters and their encounters with death and the grief that followed in its wake. The narrative employs stunning animation to portray them. The timing, pacing, the manner in which the three parallel narratives are placed and inter-weaved with each other, allow the overarching story of the documentary to truly come into its own, be all that it can be, and more. 

As colours and visuals bleed into the screen space, invoking a surreal reality of loss and heartache, inseparable from each other, a life of distractions, intoxicants, escapism and the eventual moving on is conjured for the viewer. The moving frames and lines become the most accurate representation of the transience of memory and the uncertainty of revisiting another's experience through their narrative. In the process, Apart manages to push the boundaries of animation to present a moving, poignant and surreal interaction with its subject matter.

Apart | Short Film of the Day

The story of the film opens on a note which is quite opposite to the direction it is headed in. The several layers of the narrative, the secrets hidden in the shadows and the tension simmering just below the surface are revealed in a manner that demands the viewer's full attention, compelling them to participate in the story deeply. Without giving away the big reveal at the climax, a near-impossible task, one can only talk about the emotions it invokes - from a heightened sense of tension to guilt and regret. Of course it's the viewer's choice regarding where they locate themselves on this spectrum of emotions, while a man hides from an unsuspecting woman whose house he's perhaps broken into. The woman, with an other-worldly, almost elven quality to her movements and body language, puts the viewer at unease the moment she begins a conversation with her imagined listener, an older brother. The film wants to conjure an involving narrative that ropes in the idea of the normative familial space as well as what its distortion or flight from the ordinary could potentially mean for the members who constitute it. The dimly lit frames are conceivably supposed to be an echo of the darkness of the characters' mind as well as that of the acts they have or are about to commit. However, despite that, a better control on the lighting would have benefited the film, allowing it to be more than what it already is.

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