With an international premier at the Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024, Yi-tzu Lan's ‘The Horse' brings us an, at first glance, a strange story featuring a horse appearing out of nowhere.
The Horse is screening at Osaka Asian Film Festival
Jing, standing on the threshold of a room with a moving box in her hands, can't bring herself to enter. Instead, she starts packing up in the other rooms. However, the situation is overwhelming her and her attempts at starting the work lead her back to the door of the room. Memories linked to objects in that room keep her from moving on. But then, out of nowhere, a horse appears in the apartment and its behavior forces Jing to get her act together.
Strange as it may seem at first, the concept of ‘The Horse' is very recognizable. Moving house can already be an overwhelming undertaking in itself: struggling to put boxes together, trying to fit things in,… However, the most daunting are the confrontations with our past linked to objects we're packing up. These memories can paralyze us, not only to face the tasks ahead but also to move on in life. It is then that we need some sort of kick in the butt to get going again, in this case provided figuratively by the horse.
The Horse' depends heavily on the acting of Mavis Fan (Jing). With hardly any dialogue, she manages to bring across Jing's feelings: her insecurity, sadness, anger and later determination and even peace of mind. But the horse, Brown, is as important. One of the unwritten rules of cinema is never to work with children or animals because they are unpredictable. However, the horse handlers did an amazing job here. The way the horse is filmed also needs to be mentioned in this aspect: DP Yi-tzu Lan uses closeups as pointers to convey the horse's actions and emotions.
That there hardly any music or dialogue doesn't mean the sound design by Tu Duu-Chih and Tu Tse-Kang is less important, on the contrary. Throughout the film, there is the background noise of life outside the apartment while other sounds are exaggerated: thudding boxes, tape, the snorting of the horse but also the crushing of furniture destroyed by the garbage truck. After Jing has confronted her emotions, all that remains are peaceful quite sounds like Jing humming a song to the horse.
‘The Horse' is a very restraint and sober film, void of big emotions, except for the confrontation between the insecure Jing and the big, impressive horse. This contrast between them on the one hand and their common sense of out-of-placeness on the other make that this strange concept works for the viewer.
