I Lost My Body

Year 17, Day 290 - 10/17/25 - Movie #5,174 - VIEWED ON 9/20/25

BEFORE: Another film that I figured I could watch in advance, because it's short, to help avoid the time crunch that's coming in October, due to us taking a week off to go to North Carolina and also because I may be working two jobs again soon, so you know, less time for movies. 

Alia Shawkat carries over from "Blink Twice" (or maybe "Green Room") Nope, I was right the first time. This has been hanging around my list for way too long, it came out in 2019 - now I'm not saying it's been on the list for six years, but it's possible, since it's nearly impossible to link to it, based on this cast. This is why I tried to hide it between two films with Alia Shawkat, only to then discover that she wasn't really IN one of those films, but still was credited on IMDB for NOT being in the film. Geez, thanks. But just like with "The Butterfly Effect 2", they can make a film very, very difficult for me to program, but that just makes me more determined - sooner or later (probably later) I'm going to get there. 

Since I watched this in advance, I'm going to double-up and count this as a 2nd Friday movie to send a special birthday SHOUT-out to George Wendt, born on 10/17/48. Happy birthday in sit-com heaven I guess - he passed away in May of this year. 

THE PLOT: A story of Naoufel, a young man who is in love with Gabrielle. In another part of town, a severed hand escapes from a dissection lab, determined to find its body again. 

AFTER: This is another film that I wasn't SURE should be classified as "horror", but it is about a hand trying to find the body that it came from, and if that isn't at least creepy than we maybe have to have a serious little chat. The film presents two timelines mingled together, one in the present where the hand is moving around the Paris suburbs, trying to find the arm and body it belongs to, and in the past timeline, we follow an orphaned teen from Morocco, Naoufel, as he works part-time in, you guessed it, Paris. He wants to be a pianist and he records his day-to-day thoughts on cassette tapes. 

Naoufel delivers pizza, but he is often late, forcing the pizza company to give out refunds, or free pizza, to its clients. He tries to deliver a pizza to a young woman named Gabrielle, but the stuck security door won't allow him in, so he never sees her, and apparently she never gets her pizza, either. Naoufel is really bad at his job, I guess. 

He follows her to the library where she works and then to her uncle's apartment, where she drops off medicine. When confronted, he lies and says he is there to apply for the apprentice job, which is listed on the building's bulletin board. The carpenter, of course, is Gabrielle's uncle, and he takes Naoufel under his wing and shows him how to work with tools and repair things around his building. 

Not meanwhile, in the present, the hand has escaped from a laboratory refrigerator and is journeying across Paris. There's no indication how the hand knows where it is, because it can't see, or where to go, because it has no brain, so really there's no explanation for how the hand is making this journey, except that this is an animated film, and anything can happen in animation, as long as somebody can draw it. I suppose it's really more important here to think about what all this could mean rather than whether all this is possible, which it's not. 

Naoufel uses his new woodworking skills to build a wooden igloo on a rooftop, he and Gabrielle had a conversation before about living in the Arctic. There's kind of a burgeoning romance here, except Naoufel blows it by telling her the truth about how they met before, when he was trying in vain to deliver a pizza to her. Terrible idea, because now she thinks that he's been stalking her, also lying to her by not telling about that sooner, so that's two big strikes against him. So Gabrielle is upset and leaves, Naoufel goes to his cousin's party and gets into a drunken fight, then he's hung over the next morning in the carpenter's shop, and do I really need to draw you a picture here? 

At some point later, the hand finally finds its body, and of course that's Naoufel. The hand lies next to him while he sleeps but cannot re-attach itself to his arm. The arm hides under the bed while Naoufel listens to his tape recorder, which still has a recording of his parents made just before the fatal car crash. Gabrielle later finds his tape recorder in the igloo on the roof, after Naoufel had jumped from the roof to a nearby construction crane, which somehow proved that we're all capable of bold moves, ones that can change our fate.  

I guess that's what this really all comes down to, how we can't change our pasts, and we can't go back to the way things were, but we can take moves that will change our future. But figuring that out takes a LOT of reading between the lines here, it's a very subtle message, I think. The rest, all the stuff with the severed hand, I think I'll file under "body horror" and just move on. Again this is not outright scary, just very creepy and very French, or is that the same thing?

Directed by Jeremy Clapin

Also starring the voices of Dev Patel (last seen in "About Cherry"), George Wendt (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Tucker Chandler, Anouar H. Smaine (last seen in "Extraction II"), Sarah Lynn Dawson, Jonny Mars (last seen in "Joe"), Barbara Goodson (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Tara Sands, Brooke Burgstahler, Charles Fathy (last heard in "W."), Dennis Kleinman (last heard in "The Tomorrow Man"), Mark Lewis. (last seen in "Demolition"), Tipper Newton, Jarrod Pistilli, Wolfie Trausch

RATING: 4 out of 10 sugar cubes