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The Horaks (Veronica Zilkova, Jan Hartl) decide to buy a weekend house to work on it in order to keep
their mind off their disability to have a baby - a plan that is
moderately successful at best. One day though, the husband unearths a
tree-stump at the house & carves it like a baby to cheer up his
wife. Unfortunately his wife takwes the joke a little too seriously
& starts to care for the tree-stump as if it was a real baby - much
to his dismay, actually. Also, she makes up a scheme to go through a
fake pregnancy to finally pass off the tree-stump as her real baby - a
crazy idea, only to be surpased by the fact that, after the end of her pregnancy
the tree-stump really comes to life. Even then - at first at least - the
Horaks manage to pass the living tree-stump - now called Otik - as a
human baby, & only the neighbour's daughter Alzbetka (Veronika
Adamcova) gets suspicious, partly from reading a similar fairytale in an
old storybook, but she of course is a mere child, so who would believe
her ?! Otik soon develops asocial behavioural patterns, though, eating
up first the Horak's cat, later the postman as well as a social worker,
leading Mr. Horak to only one logical conclusion, locking Otik into a
box, banning him into the cellar & thus starve him to death. This
might have put an end to it all, but at this point Alzbetka has grown
wise to them & decides to take care of Otik herself, first feeding
leftovers of family meals to him, later emptying the family fridge from
time to time, & at the very last letting Otik have a neighbour every
now & again. In the end though, an elderly neighbour forces Alzbetka
to give her the storybook, reading the fairytale herself & coming to
her own conclusions. The last scene has her descending into the cellar,
hoe in hand, to go kill Otik just like in the book ...
Even thopugh the synopsis might however remotely sound like a
horror-yarn, this is actually a surreal & absurdist black comedy,
(supposedly) based on an old fairytale which is respectfully modernized.
The outcome is simply a great & wholly original piece of cinematic
art, which is all too rare in our times.
This movie was one of director Svankmajer's rare excursions into live action
filmmaking after
doing heaps of animated (mainly stop-motion) movies - both shorts &
features -, & he is doing extremely well in handling this technique,
too. There are some stop motion scenes in this one though, mainly
to make the tree-stump come to life, & a handdrawn animated sequence
does
vividly represent the fairy tale.
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find Little Otik at adultvideouniverse.com
