Death Does Not Exist (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for each new statue (let’s get the party started!)
Take a Drink: for wolves
Take a Drink: for erupting blood
Do a Shot: for resurrection
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Not a lot of animation tends to make it outside of Cannes to the U.S. and the awards season conversation, give or take a Sylvain Chomet joint or two. Flow did just last year, though, and here’s hoping Death Does Not Exist proves similarly successful (even though it’s about as far from that positively family friendly film as you can get).
Death Does Not Exist puts us in the headspace of an environmental and political extremist as she and a group of compatriots attack a rich person’s compound (or perhaps before or after that?)
A Toast
Quebecois director Félix Dufour-Laperrière and his team have created an utterly unique animated film here, combining art styles clearly influenced by animators across the globe yet producing something defiantly their own. The color scheme in particular pops, like the choice of the color gold for blood in the initial shoot-out, or rendering its protagonist in green like the foliage she sinks into when she abandons the fight, or perhaps the environment which her desire to save has driven her to this extreme action.
This is just the beginning, though, as some gorgeous and terrible imagery follows. Dufour-Laperrière and his team have an almost Ghibli-esque approach to violence and horror (don’t forget that horror is an effective part of Miyazaki’s playbook)- all slow-motion tearing and elongated ribbons of viscera.
Thematically, this film interrogates revolutionary thought and the use of violence to achieve one’s aims, no matter how righteous, but is also a more universal film about regrets and paths not taken, or what we realize we really want from life just as it trickles away.
Beer Two
Buyer beware- this film features some some dark as fuck scenes and ideas. Seldom has the full gnarly potential animation been as, in my book at least, well utilized.
Verdict
Death Does Not Exist is an imaginatively rendered journey inside the doubts and fears of a young political extremist.
