Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015)

Kaufman's second film as director after a string of successful screenplays takes us further into the relationship drama through a surrealistic perspective with physical actors replaced by unnervingly life-like stop-motion figures. This serves to support the air of dissociation that the script is predominantly concerned with, as a motivational business speaker finds all people around him with the same faces - reminiscent of everyone turning into John Malkovich in a scene in one of Kaufman's earlier work - and even the same voice. This is until the titular figure turns up, and there is a flash of love between them.
The painstakingly-created animation in puppet form of mundane real environments is an effective medium to convey the solipsism of the principal character. It also highlights the shallowness and homogeneity of, varyingly, what people say - as we inevitably focus more on verbal content than on real faces - and the American customer service experience as the epitome of the crushingly anodyne to a degree which is almost excruciating to behold.
But, here's the rub: it's also deeply disingenuous. The director chucks in a sweet nothing of an ending in a throwaway manner to steer the viewer towards thinking they've learnt something, and this is done in a far more brazen way than in, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. whereas it's actually just a deflection from what has been a barrage of barely contained misanthropy, alternating with wallowing in the main character's shallow mid-life crisis, up until that point. While it doesn't quite inflict pseud torture on the audience like his ridiculously lauded Synecdoche, New York, it would appear that Kaufman is someone used best as a source of ideas which are reined in and refined by another director.

5/10