Effigy (2024)

Effigy (2024). Effigy: Directed by John Cairns. With Shinsuke Kato, Sergey Kuvaev, Camilla Ståhl, Mihoko Watanabe. Isolated on the fringes of a soulless metropolis, Catherine survives on scraps of translation work. But a mysterious client offers a lucrative job, and an opportunity for Catherine to indulge in her malformed and incompatible desires.

“In the modern world, nothing is perhaps as important as translation. Good translators will tell you that thereu0026#39;s a certain point where they just have to make it up in order for everything to fall together. Thatu0026#39;s what the protagonist in this film does. Set against the gorgeous backdrop of workaday Tokyo, Cairnsu0026#39;s u0026quot;Effigyu0026quot; expertly captures the emotions of alienation of living in the modern built environment and pairs this against the narratives of fairy tales. Very few films these days have so much: fairy tales; anguish of translation; beauty and tragedy of the metropolis. Coda, verging on a spoiler: naturally we all remember from school that an effigy is u0026quot;a rough model of a person, made in order to be damaged or destroyed in a protest in anger.u0026quot; Youu0026#39;ll remember this vaguely at the beginning and then focus strongly on it as the credits roll. Four out of five stars because translation is never perfect.”