The Black Hole (Fantastic Fest 2024)

The Black Hole – recently played at Fantastic Fest – is a comedy/sci-fi anthology from Estonian director Moonika Siimets. My only experience with Estonian cinema is November (Rainer Sarnet, 2017), a historical, mythic, folkloric fantasy, which will tell of modern Estonia but those cues will primarily be identifiable to the familiar, everyone else will largely miss those cues. The Black Hole presents the chance to discover a new national cinema through a more relatable timeframe. While that may not be what Ebert was referring to by calling movies an empathy machine, it is one of the ways I chose to interpret it. However, relatable might be an odd choice of words as we are talking about a very absurd anthology movie, down to it not following the strict anthology structure – instead optioning its own order of business. There are four stories contained within three headings/titles: Life Worth Living, The Mystery of the Wooden Shoe and Apple Pie; and they are credited as being inspired by the writing of Armin Kõomägi & satirist, playwright and Screenwriter Andrus Kivirähk.

‘Life Worth Living’ is two-fold, one half has a pair of “post-menopausal women” struggling for work (even if you have work, it doesn’t even guarantee a liveable income), in a harsh economic reality only for them to happen upon an Alien posing as a local. After an initial misunderstanding, the peaceful creature offers the pair 1,000 Euro per night to lay down and let the far off visitors study their anatomy for science as lab rats for hire. The other half sees a female personal trainer at a gym find a woman crying in one of the lockers, after which the pair start living together in a whirlwind romance – unknowingly sharing their flat with a spider the size of a dog. ‘Mystery of the Wooden Shoe’ revolves around an involuntarily chaste young man in a town full of scumbags, who has a turn of fate when he loses his job. He meets an Austrian man dressed up in all the stereotypical paraphernalia, later he turns up at his mother’s flat (he is sleeping on her sofa) trying to sell a vacuum cleaner for a shocking amount, this sets off an obsession with the suspicious salesman. If I was to pigeonhole this story, it is something of an erotic neo-noir as it evolves into a whirlwind romance for the inexperienced lover before it segues into a five minute segment called ‘Apple Pie’.

The story of the two women moonlighting as lab rats sees the Black Hole at its most scintillatingly inventive. World cinema provides a canvas of understanding for different countries, this story, more than any other, shows an Estonia where workers struggle, and employers give preferential treatment to people from Finland and Ukraine – however, this is all depicted (even before the fantastical arrives) with a surrealist absurdity reminiscent of Roy Andersson and Radu Jude. This is to say, reality as we know it but there’s some small detail that’s slightly askew – then aliens turn up, upping the ante for the weird. These are practical aliens, creations that give off a sense of crusty futurism that you’d find in late-era Red Dwarf down to the gross detail of their flaccid, phallic-looking emanating from some mouth-like cavity. A real creative triumph for the production designer, costume and makeup designers with it not being even remotely humanoid like so many other cinematic aliens tend to be. Later, the violence enacted on the two women only neither feel it nor are they particularly bothered, it never fails to pull a laugh from me, especially with how far it escalates. It’s not just funny either, it is thematically deep telling how there’s always someone better off (Finish, Ukrainians or the Andromedans), and nothing is more expensive than pride twinned with extreme desperation.

The second half of Life Worth Living has a setup similar to Rose Glass’s Loves Lies Bleeding in both the character archetypes and their horniness, but in other keys ways, entirely different. This is a fairly straightforward, humble story of two women falling in love albeit with the spectre of lying sneaking into their relationship. The “muscle mommy” as advertised in the fantastic fest promo (she aspires to this) is trying to keep secret the spiders and mysterious sounds of something or something lingering throughout her flat, and her new lover is lying about who keeps texting her. This is just a humble, perfectly likeable love story albeit with one of the most adorable reveals of 2024. That reveal and the incidental characters are crying out for more, many sitcoms would cry out to have in this supporting cast – that oddball detective especially, what even is his story?

I would’ve loved more stories in the same register and worldview as the first two, unfortunately, The Mystery of the Wooden Shoes is a combo breaker. While it builds into a sordid (and again) very horny affair, the story doesn’t flow with as much elegance, the lead character is less likeable, and his story less interesting – one red herring around a manhole cover with illuminati-style adornment feels frustratingly undercooked despite being the inspiration behind the title. Above all, the fantastical element of the first two stories is just too subtle here, however, it does set up the Apple Pie minute segment. While the path there is a bleak lesson of consequences it reminds me of any given movie’s most important window – the first and final minutes. How you are introduced to a world is of equal, vital importance to how it leaves you. Simmets leaves her audience with an air of positivity and hope. Sure, the story that led to this climactic sequence is very sluggish but this climactic five minutes will leave you wanting to see more from this satisfyingly weird Estonian town. And just as importantly, it will leave you with a smile.

If you leave the audience with a smile and wanting more, you’ve done a great job – after all, it’s better to want more than tired of a movie world.

Few are making movies like The Black Hole, sure, other people make movies like this, but they do it with nihilism at their core and that’s not what the Simmets is doing. This is an expansive, endlessly imaginative piece with cinematography that captures both grim reality and endless potential of the fantastical; has practical effects, puppetry and the most gorgeous teleportation effect I’ve seen; and is peppered with enough subtext for a handful of movies. Its comedy is hit and miss but we are dealing with cultural differences and what makes different cultures laugh is often vastly different, but when it does land it’s riotously funny. While not all stories are equally strong, show me an anthology movie where that isn’t the case, the important factor here is The Black Hole has more than enough for both it and its director to be put firmly on your radar.

Rob’s Archive – The Black Hole (2024)