I LOST MY BODY – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek.

I Lost My Body, now nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, is a good example of just how far ingenuity can get you. It’s a creative, mind-boggling affair, full of expressionistic animation, yet falls short of its intended heights. Watching it feels profound, beyond that feels muddled. 

I Lost My Body follows two stories: First the story of Naoufel (Hakim Faris/Dev Patel), a young man attempting to find peace and love in the face of his tragic life and second, the story of how a dismembered hand is attempting to find its body. There’s plenty of thematic material to be mined out of how a piece of person is both created and at what point it’s time to let it go…I Lost My Body just never quite gets into that exploration. 

Instead, it opts to use these plots to dance around these themes. The love story, in which Naoufel is attempting to find peace, missteps. It uses flashbacks to Naoufel’s childhood to present setups, but they don’t feel baked in. A fly does influence a pivotal time in Naoufel’s life but seems meaningless in its influence of other parts of the film/storytelling. Sure, that could be part of the point. Different elements of life don’t seem significant until they become significant. Unfortunately, that doesn’t do the storytelling any favors. 

The adventure film aspect fairs much better. Co-writer/director Jeremy Clapin has a brilliant eye for these sequences in both pacing and character. As the hand traverses the bustling world, it encounters intense situations, rendered with the greatest of care. The hand has more personality than most of the humans. Its macabre encounters do too. The eerie nature of all of it reminds one of Hedgehog in the Fog. It is at once scary and sad. 

That being said, that type of resonance can only take the film so far. The climax seems disjointed (no pun intended) from the rest of the film and the resolution feels just as removed. No problem has been necessarily solved. No questions have been answered. It is simply life. 

To restate, this could be the point. If it is, it didn’t work for me. Underneath all of the animated wonder, I Lost My Body isn’t about much. It wears the shell of ingenuity, which it certainly has, but can’t always cover up the lackluster plot underneath. 

2.5 out of 4

I LOST MY BODY opens everywhere and screens exclusively in the St. Louis area at Landmark’s Tivoli Theatre. It is also streaming on Netflix.