While movie theaters remain closed through this ongoing period of social-distancing, we can look to the abundance of films that are available to watch across all streaming platforms (though do support your local cinema through the purchase of gift cards, if you can).

For this week’s review, I want to take the opportunity to recommend something that is currently available to stream, which you may have yet to see or even have added to your queue. But at only fifteen minutes long (did I mention that it’s a short?), you won’t be outside of your comfort zone for too long.

Now streaming on Netflix, Anima is a musical short film from Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke and filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. Where one could liken Anima to an extended music video, it really does operate as a short film. Ambitiously abstract and conceptual in nature (the film touts itself as a “mind-bending visual piece”), Anima is a loosely narrative story of an unnamed man (Yorke) who, amidst the dream-inducing drudgery of working-class life, finds a woman (Dajana Roncione) only to lose her, and attempts to find her again through obstacles and oppressive forces.

I’m not exactly sure why Anima feels like the right film to recommend this week, given the state of everything right now. But as I think through it more, I find that a few things leap out at me since my initial advanced screening at an IMAX theater last year. Quite simply, the thematic undertones of Anima dramatize how, through the society we’ve created and actively participate in, we have grown to sleepwalk through a mechanized, spiritless life. The amazing choreography by Damien Jalet sees a host of dancers envelope Yorke throughout the piece (with Yorke evoking Buster Keaton-like comedy), and blend movements that are a battle between the soullessly dazed and the spiritually awakened.

I don’t intend nor wish to hide the fact that I am also a fan of both Yorke and Anima’s filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson (if you need a further recommendation of a film to see, I highly suggest The Master and Phantom Thread). Beyond the film’s other artistic credits (with projections by Tarik Barri and photography by the great cinematographer Darius Jhnodji), Anima leaves the viewer with a very real sense of what dreaming through real life can feel like. Now feels like a moment where we’ve all woken from a shared, comfortable dream, and must reassert how we wish to live our lives now that we’ve awakened.

ANIMA (2019)

Starring Thom Yorke, Dajana Roncione

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Distributed by Netflix. 15 minutes.