“The Fantastic Golem Affairs” Tackles Loneliness Through Absurdity
“Eating a frozen dick, that’s a declaration of love, no?” utters David (David Menéndez) in the opening scene of Burnin’ Percebes’ The Fantastic Golem Affairs. It’s the early hours of the morning after a night of debauchery with his best friend, Juan (Brays Efe), and they’re playing charades. From there, The Fantastic Golem Affairs goes places you could not and would not imagine, but that’s the magic of what you’re about to see. It’s an exploration of loneliness through a surrealist world of falling pianos, ceramic people, and a deeply emotional karaoke performance.
David and Juan’s early-morning rooftop game of charades is cut short when David, fully naked to act out King Kong, falls off the side of the building to his death. His body shatters when he lands on a car. This is when Juan learns that David is actually a lifelike ceramic person. When he lands, his body becomes dust, but only Juan witnesses it. He becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to his best friend and finds himself coming up against bizarre fake cops who keep trying to throw him off the trail.
Courtesy Gluon Media
The Fantastic Golem Affairs may bill itself as a mystery, and it is, but the real bulk of the story is how to go on living after losing someone who meant so much to you. What do you do when the person you spent so much time with is now gone? Even worse, what happens when your investigation leads you to discover that everything you knew about that person was a lie? What then? The Fantastic Golem Affairs takes the ideas of loneliness and isolation, bakes them into a ceramic person, and then shatters everything. Juan is left to pick up the pieces, sweep up the dust, and discover who he is on his own.
Inevitably, the pastel world of The Fantastic Golem Affairs will draw comparisons to Wes Anderon’s style of filmmaking. The Fantastic Golem Affairs has similar camera movements, an eye for symmetry, and a collection of oddball characters who have their own weird way of speaking. The colors of The Fantastic Golem Affairs also bring to mind fellow Spaniard filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. While these influences are clear, it never feels as though Burnin’ Percebes are trying to copy a voice that is not theirs. They are students of the craft, inspired by it, but not interested in mere replication.
Courtesy Gluon Media
Burnin’ Percebes have harnessed the power of magical realism to look at the male loneliness epidemic. But it’s not just men. People of every gender are missing community, especially after the isolation of the pandemic. The Fantastic Golem Affairs features a company whose sole purpose is to create companions of sorts to alleviate those feelings of loneliness. Everyone is searching for a remedy to this lack of community, but shortcuts like pre-programmed companions or AI chatbots are not the answer. It’s only through meaningful interactions and involving yourself in the world around you that things change.
The rise of absurdism in film is mirroring the state of the world right now. Things feel dark, hopeless, and bleak, so sometimes the only thing that makes sense is to use the outrageous to remind us that we’re here by chance. Because some animal crawled out of the primordial ooze and we evolved to become a species that’s doomed to pay taxes. The Fantastic Golem Affairs is about connection in the purest sense. It asks us to view each other as our weirdest and most vulnerable selves to see if there’s still worth within us.
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