LIFTED ★★★★
Directed by Daniel Robichaud from USA
July 22, 2025
In Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytic exploration of fairy tales, he posits that the hero's journey through fantastical realms serves as a metaphorical passage through the unconscious mind's labyrinthine corridors. Daniel Robichaud's LIFTED (2025) transforms the mundane verticality of elevator travel into a Dantean pilgrimage through ontological thresholds, where a bespectacled everyman named Hugo becomes our Virgil-less wanderer navigating the purgatorial spaces between desire and actualisation. The film's watercolour aesthetic—reminiscent of Frédéric Back's The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) yet inflected with the oneiric fluidity of Gianluigi Toccafondo's painted animations—creates a visual palimpsest where reality bleeds into fantasy like pigment on wet paper. Robichaud, whose technical virtuosity spans from the digital crowds of Titanic (1997) to his Goya-winning Pinocchio 3000 (2004), here strips away technological excess to reveal animation's most profound capacity: the transmutation of quotidian anxieties into transcendent visual poetry.
The elevator—that most Freudian of architectural vessels—becomes Robichaud's chosen chronotope for exploring what Gaston Bachelard termed "intimate immensity," where confined spaces paradoxically open onto infinite psychological landscapes. Hugo's descent through breaking cables into oceanic expanses and desert wastelands recalls not only the surrealist geography of Jan Švankmajer's Alice (1988) but also the recent metaphysical elevators of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria (2021), where vertical movement becomes temporal displacement. Yet where Weerasethakul employs stasis, Robichaud orchestrates kinetic metamorphosis: the octopus that engulfs Hugo's ship emerges as a Jungian shadow-self, the tentacular manifestation of social paralysis that prevents him from the simple act of returning Claire's butterfly earring. This lepidopteran talisman—itself a symbol of transformation—functions as what D.W. Winnicott would call a "transitional object," bridging the chasm between Hugo's hermetic interiority and the possibility of genuine human connection.
The film's most arresting sequence occurs when Hugo, suspended between elevator shafts, literally inhabits the interstitial space of mechanical infrastructure—a moment that crystallises Robichaud's exploration of what Marc Augé termed "non-places," those transitory zones where identity becomes suspended. Here, amidst cables and darkness, Hugo embodies Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life," stripped of social coordinates yet paradoxically most alive to possibility. The violin-driven score—its strings echoing the vertical cables Hugo descends—creates what Michel Chion would recognise as "acousmatic" space, where sound exists without visible source, mirroring Hugo's own dislocation from familiar reality. This sonic architecture recalls the elevator music trope yet transforms it into something approaching Arvo Pärt's tintinnabuli technique, where simplicity masks profound spiritual inquiry.
What elevates LIFTED beyond mere allegory is Robichaud's understanding that animation, as Norman McLaren insisted, occurs not on each frame but in the spaces between them. Working as a solitary auteur—a rarity in contemporary animation's industrial complex—Robichaud achieves what Béla Tarr accomplished in live-action: a consistency of vision so absolute it becomes transparent, allowing theme to emerge through pure visual rhythm. The film shares DNA with Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow trilogy (2015-2021) in its ability to render existential complexity through deceptive simplicity, yet where Hertzfeldt employs ironic distance, Robichaud offers earnest vulnerability. Hugo's blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles become windows not into the soul but into what Emmanuel Levinas called "the face of the Other"—that ethical encounter that demands response. When Hugo finally returns transformed, clutching Claire's earring, we witness not romantic fulfilment but something more radical: the birth of intersubjective possibility.
LIFTED ultimately reveals itself as a meditation on what Hélène Cixous termed "sorties"—those exits from prescribed identity that paradoxically lead us home. Robichaud's eight-minute odyssey contains more philosophical weight than most features, proving that duration and depth exist in inverse proportion when wielded by a master animator. The film's final image—Hugo extending the recovered earring to Claire—becomes a secular Eucharist, a communion of souls made possible only through fantastic dislocation. In our contemporary moment of digital isolation and algorithmic mediation, LIFTED offers something both ancient and urgently necessary: a reminder that transformation requires not ascension but descent, not clarity but confusion, not efficiency but the courage to press the wrong button and tumble into possibility. Robichaud has gifted us a pocket epic that proves animation remains our most potent medium for rendering the invisible visible, the internal external, the impossible inevitable. One eagerly awaits his forthcoming Reflection, sensing that this solitary artist has only begun to map the territories where consciousness meets craft. - Reviewed by Adrián Pérez. Grade A