Reflective Encounters

“As a work created by a small collection of directors, with a talented crew hailing from one of the strongest animation schools active today, Coffin is an exceptionally crafted film, displaying not just incredibly well-observed design and performances but truly using animation to its most artistic and narratively adept capacity. The film shows a lone salesman (a loyal white-collar employee who works excessively long hours in inner-city capitals) as he returns to his coffin apartment, a form of shared home living that squeezes small living quarters into overpopulated city complexes. The combination of claustrophobic dwellings and noisy housemates culminates into a cacophony of extreme visual imagery, a prediction of what living in the increasingly cramped world will become for many.

The attention to detail in both the minutiae of movements as well as the constantly changing environment add to the mounting stress of the central character. The film also has broader, more reflective notions on the nature of rest, the cost of living as well as the mental and physical mania of living in an ever-deafening, constantly-moving, endlessly-hungry world that, as we are all too acutely aware, could very soon take us and the planet we inhabit to breaking point.”

— Laura-Beth Cowley