Puppet Master

People do strange things in search of love, and even stranger things to get away from themselves. Sometimes, in the process, they discover things they didn't expect.

We presume that the woman knows who the man is and what he does. She already looks nervous when she arrives at the bar and starts watching him, but by the time she gets up to follow him, she has steeled herself. Nobody has spoken to her in the interim. We get the impression that she's all too used to being ignored. Perhaps, with him, it will be different.

There is no dialogue between the two - what follows is a story told through dance and puppetry, beautifully conceived and highly evocative. First there are his hands on her body, a sense of threat, and her surrender; her choice not to resist as he wraps her in cling film, round and round, cocooning her, dictating the arrangement of her limbs. Positioned in a chair, she is masked, reshaped with addition of pieces of clay. He lifts her, dances with her, loves her in a way not directly sexual but profoundly intimate. She is the perfect creation. She is his.

Many people who fetishise this sort of experience say that it induces a sense of serenity: to be enclosed is to be freed from responsibility, separated from the stresses of day to day life. The woman here seems to find peace as an object; but in becoming this, she loses all her power, and when the man turns his attention to another puppet, she, unsupported, crumples to the floor.

What follows is different, more complicated, and explores further aspects of the way power can be exchanged and managed in relationships, the way it can change people and redefine them. The film is expertly performed, with Merja Pöyhönen, who plays the woman, also controlling the puppet who replaces her during some sequences, creating a physicality that spans the two bodies and helps us believe they are the same. In the latter stages of the film, she takes on new forms of embodiment, expressed with the same confidence.

An unusual and daring film with plenty to say beyond its basic premise, Puppet Master was selected for Fantasia 2018, and it's well worth catching.