Anomalisa

Anomalisa begins with a single voice. Or maybe single voices. Multiple copies of Tom Noonan’s voice pile up over a blank screen, creating a wall of unintelligible sound. It’s a panoply of voices. A cacophony of voices. An oppression of voices.

This is what life is like for Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a customer service guru in Cincinnati for a convention, whose inescapable ennui has rendered everyone around him – his wife, his child, his ex-girlfriend – indistinguishable, speaking in the same bland voice, and wearing the same mask-like face. We follow Michael as he looks up an old flame, tries to buy a toy for his son, and has a potentially life-changing encounter with Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the only person in this nightmare with a unique voice. Anomalisa conducts itself through a detailed examination of the wonderful minutiae of the everyday; these experiences – ordering room service, walking along dark streets – are the ones that truly form us, influencing the direction of our lives.

Directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson opted for an unorthodox animation method, making use of stop-motion techniques with 3D-printed models. The result is a sense of unease that initially leaves you in the lurch; characters’ faces have splits along the middle, giving everyone the sense they are wearing wire-frame glasses, and their skin gives an impression of softness, like the downy surface of a peach. Much of the focus of 3D printing has been on its possible impacts on weapons manufacture, or heavy industry, but what about how it can print off an expression of longing? Or capture the nuances of a forced grin?

This style, along with the omnipresence of Noonan’s voice, sits like a heavy weight, making for uneasy watching at first. However, as the story progresses we no longer notice it, engrossed in the unfolding tale of tenderness playing out in front of us. And then it’s brought to our attention again, and suddenly the whole set-up makes sense. It’s a magical moment, one that expands the powers of cinema. To speak more of it would be to lessen its impact.

While Anomalisa may seem like a classic tale of short-lived intimacy, a romance that falls away as the sun comes up, the actual film is a much stranger, off-putting beast. Kaufman and Johnson do not try and make things enjoyable for the viewer, putting us through Stone’s agonisingly awkward encounters, making palpable the unbridgeable gap between himself and others. Anyone who has touched down late at night knows the feeling made clear in Anomalisa, which by and large takes place in neutral spaces: the back of a taxi cab; the arrivals area of an airport; the faceless hotel room, stacked up with innumerable other identical cubes in the Fregoli Hotel (Fregoli Delusion: a psychiatric disorder characterised by a belief that multiple people are the same person in disguise). A hotel room is another world, a beige world, one where – if only for a night – you can be someone else, somewhere else. It’s an anomaly, a break-point with your old life, from which you came and to which you will return. It can be the loneliest place in the world.

Kaufman and Johnson make coherent this myriad of impressions. The room becomes an emblem for the alienation of Stone, who is really, above all, simply tired. Thewlis imbues his northern lilt with a lethargic quality, one that only lifts when he meets Lisa. Jason Leigh is, similarly, stellar, with her quiet, strained delivery of Cyndi Lauper's ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ becoming one of the emotional centre-points of the film.

There are links to Lost in Translation here, but for me, the closest link is to the work of the late Satoshi Kon, particularly his 2006 film Paprika, which shared Anomalisa’s beguiling sense of stepping into a waking dream, crafting a world that is simultaneously familiar and unapproachable. A sterling piece of work from Kaufman and Johnson, Anomalisa is a modern marvel, an exploration of what it means to be human. It’s not about how we feel love, or how we feel pain. Anomalisa is really just about how we feel.