Fantasia 2025: Death Does Not Exist and the Forest Where Action Hesitates

There is something quietly electric happening in Montreal’s animation scene. Not in the way of pipeline efficiency or service work for louder markets, but in the emergence of films that reject utility. Films that claim the language of animation as expressive medium and philosophical terrain. Less industry, more cinema.

Death Does Not Exist, from Félix Dufour Laperrière, joins a group of works that feel spiritually closer to the French tradition than to anything else in Canadian production. It does not try to please. It does not try to sell you an answer. What it offers instead is form in tension with idea, image in tension with voice, and a woman walking through a forest, trying to decide whether to die for something.

Before Action, a Thought

Hélène is about to carry out a suicide mission. The reasons are not spelled out, but we understand this is meant to trigger something larger, a disruption of consequence. Before this act, she wanders through a forest. That forest becomes everything. It is not just terrain. It is her belief, her memory, her hesitation.

The narrative folds into itself like a thought returning. Hélène reflects on justice, guilt, impact, and silence. The film is not interested in dramatic escalation. It prefers to hold its breath. The question it asks is not whether she will act, but whether acting means anything in a world so loud and so unchanged.

Animation That Refuses Separation

The animation is rendered in richly layered 2D. It is not decorative. It thnks with the film. Hélène and her environment share a color palette, merging form and figure. The forest swells and recoils with emotional logic. Images mutate and reform, often moving between the grotesque and the serene without warning.

This is not just an aesthetic choice. It is a refusal to separate character from landscape, inner life from world. Félix Dufour Laperrière and his team create not just scenes but states of being. The result is both intimate and distant, like watching someone dream from the outside.

When Ideas Echo Instead of Deepen

Despite its formal power, the film’s script does not always meet the same level of complexity. Hélène’s monologue hovers around survivor’s guilt, the fear of irrelevance, the morality of doing something versus doing nothing. But it begins to circle. There is not enough variation in tone or movement in thought.

The final third of the film is where something truly unexpected happens. The tone fractures. The imagery becomes feverish. The control gives way to chaos. It is here that the film feels most alive. I could not help but wonder what the experience would have been if this risk had arrived sooner, or sustained longer. For a filmmaker so skilled in the language of image, it feels like a missed opportunity not to let it fully speak.

A Film That Refuses Closure

Death Does Not Exist is not about a woman who sacrifices herself. It is about what happens before. The moment before the moment. The time we spend in the question. Whether we act or not, whether it matters, whether meaning is something we make or something we are born without.

The film does not resolve these questions. I do not think it wants to. What it offers is a forest. A body. A choice. And the strange stillness that arrives when doubt becomes louder than conviction.