Fantasia 2021, Part LXI: Kratt
“Cuckoo!” is a 7-minute short film from the Netherlands directed by Jörgen Scholtens, who co-wrote with Jörgen Van Weeren. It’s a surreal piece about a tiny man (Frank Lammers) who lives in a cuckoo clock with his even tinier cat. He’s responsible for popping out on the hour, but one day things go wrong and lead to a cascade failure. It’s an absurd piece about routine, and it has a good production design involving old technologies. It’s a bittersweet story that works.
With it was bundled Kratt, an Estonian feature written and directed by Rasmus Merivoo. In 2017 I loved November, a film about the superstitions of a small Estonian village in the 18th century; one of those superstitions was the Kratt, a monstrous servant you could get the Devil to bring to life to do your will. The Kratt needs to always be doing work, or it’ll turn violently against its masters. To be clear, this film is nothing like November, which was a downbeat arthouse fantasy; this Kratt is an oddball comedy-satire, mixing straight-faced gags with moments of outright gore. Still, I was interested in seeing another spin on the Kratt story, not least because of the different tone this movie promised.
Kratt takes place in the present day, when a couple of young kids, Mia and Kevin (Nora and Harri Merivoo, the director’s real-life children) are left with their grandmother (Mari Lill) in a small village somewhere in Estonia. The kids are unimpressed with farm life, and when they find out about the legend of the Kratt they think they have a solution. Things, of course, go wrong. Their quest to build the Kratt and the consequences of their actions unfold against the background of village life and its controversies, which include protestors trying to prevent deforestation and a middle-aged politician (Ivo Uukkivi) caught up in corruption and playing both sides.