Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Lost My Body’ on Netflix, a Strange Animated Movie About a Young Man’s Lost, Severed and Possibly Sentient Hand

Netflix movie I Lost My Body seems destined to be one of those mostly obscure, left-field Oscar nominees for best animated feature that’s likely to be obliterated in the award horserace by a Disney-affiliated product. You know, movies like Chico and Rita and My Life as a Zucchini, which prompt WTF head-scratching when Oscar nominations are announced, and the celebrity reading the filmmakers’ names off the teleprompter inevitably mispronounce them because they’re foreign. Not that these films deserve such a fate, but this is the reality that comes with just being happy to be nominated. And so we’re here to break this cycle, and tell you about I Lost My Body now, so you can smugly assert that you heard about it before all this happens. Of course, the scenario also hinges on whether Official Oscar People will have the chutzpah to nominate a movie about a quasi-sentient severed hand seeking a reunion with the rest of its body, which may be dicey.

I LOST MY BODY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A fly buzzes around a gruesome scene. Well, the gruesomeness is mostly implied: broken glasses, blood, an unconscious face with a black eye. Cut to: a lab. A hand navigates free from its confines, spidering around like a crab. There are flashbacks to the hand’s halcyon days: the hand in some sand, the hand trying to catch a fly, the hand holding a microphone and obsessively recording the world around its former owner, whose mother played the cello. Do the flashbacks originate from the hand itself, or its former owner? Does the hand have a mind’s eye? It seems to “see” things around it as it makes its way through the city — rats near the subway tracks, a lighter to scare them away, a pigeon that it strangles to death when maybe it only wanted a free ride? It’s hard to pinpoint the motives of a hand that may or may not be independently intelligent.

One of those flashbacks is tragic: an auto accident. The hand’s owner is Naoufel (voice of Hakim Faris), whose parents died in the wreck. He was only a boy. Now he’s 20ish, living with two relatives who have the allure of dead eels. He has a job as the worst pizza-delivery person in France. He’s always late, and the owner chews him out, because they have one of those 30-minutes-or-it’s-free guarantees. Naoufel just absorbs the criticism, and goes home to lay on his depressing mattress. Notably, he still has his hand, so the hand-sans-body enjoys its own narrative timeline, and if you think that’s a cinema first, well, I’m here to tell you it’s not.

The next day, Naoufel is tagged by a motorist. He and his moped are OK, but the pizzas are worse for wear. He tries to deliver one anyway, to a woman on the 35th floor of a high-rise where the door buzzer doesn’t work right — or maybe the woman is just messing with him, because he’s late and she’s angry. They sort of hit it off over the intercom; she’s a librarian named Gabrielle (Victoire Du Bois), which is just enough information for Naoufel to indulge a little light stalking. He visits the library, and follows her to a woodworking shop. There, he talks the owner and craftsman, her uncle Gigi (Patrick d’Assumcao), into taking him on as an apprentice. He and Gabrielle hit it off a little bit again, although she’s unaware he’s the same hapless pizza boy. Meanwhile, the hand has many harrowing adventures, in an attempt to find Naoufel, and this odd little tale about a hand and the rest of its body eventually comes to a head.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: So, that other movie about a lost hand? In 1981, Michael Caine starred in a movie called The Hand, playing a cartoonist who gets his hand chopped off, and it comes back to strangle him. It’s something else. (I assert it probably would have been a better film if the hand was really into tickling instead of murder.) The film has many first-hand shots in it, just like I Lost My Body, which is based on a book by Guillaume Laurant, who scripted Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sublime Amelie. If combining the former movie’s wild lunacy with the latter’s tender melancholy seems like an odd tonal marriage, well, at least I Lost My Body dares to be different.

Performance Worth Watching: If you’ve gotten this far, hurdling the hand puns like an Olympic star, and don’t think I’m going to highlight the hand’s performance, then perhaps you don’t understand that several wistfully sad lonely-people movies are released every year, but the release schedule features almost zero sentient-severed-hand movies.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s always faster than you. If you aim for it, by the time you get to it, it’ll be gone.” — Advice from Naoufel’s father, speaking in metaphors, but also teaching him how to catch a fly in the same hand that’ll someday be floating around the city on an umbrella.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So the hand has feelings, too. One shot clearly illustrates how its lost hope and is seriously bummed out. I imagine songs by The Cure playing in the hand’s mind’s eye’s ears as it lies there, dejected and exhausted. All it wants is the warmth and security of its owner, who may be experiencing his own feelings of worthlessness, and would no doubt be brightened by something needing him so, even if it’s just a hand that killed a pigeon and probably likes The Cure a lot. (Perhaps it’s all about loving severed hands unconditionally, flaws and all.)

Director Jeremy Clapin uses tone and evocative visual compositions to do interesting and subtly provocative things with a strange, strange story. I know I’m making a lot of offhand hand jokes here, but Naoufel is truly the film’s emotional core, the kid who lost everything and has very little and is desperate to follow through on a real human connection — awkwardly, perhaps not unforgivably so. It’s not a great leap of logic to say he likely hasn’t had many of those, and could use a little empathy. The hand’s determination to keep on keeping on is clearly driven by psychic remnants of Naoufel’s spirit in there somewhere, maybe in the nerves or marrow or keratin. Or perhaps it’s time for us to stop using our brains to figure out I Lost My Body and just follow it intuitively with our hearts, because it works just fine like that, and helps cut through its abundant eccentricity.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Weird movie! But also weirdly effective, thoughtful and original. It’s not easy to execute such a peculiar idea, but you really have to hand it to Clapin for pulling it off.

 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream I Lost My Body on Netflix