Film Review: A Kind Of Testament (Un Genre De Testament)
by Marinell Haegelin

Stephen Vuillemin, France 2023

Writer-director-animator Stephen Vuillemin packs a lot into A KIND OF TESTAMENT, particularly regarding social media dissociative and voyeuristic pervasiveness, identity theft, confusion, and behavioral outcomes.

“So weird,” a woman says seeing animated, cartoonish photos using her personal profile pictures and they look incongruous chiefly because things have been added. She wants to register a web domain in her name only to find this person, whose name is the same. So, the woman emails her and gets a confession. Strange is when she asks “why” the question ricochets into a void. She Googles her, then finds her Facebook page. Cancer, death. Time passes. Indecisiveness squanderer; feelings of failure. Supplanted by a younger, wholesome entity. “I am you in the future,” she tells her daughter. “Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”

“But what about my dog?” What is the wrong decision—scared—at times.

As the unemotional somehow mechanized female voiceover accompanies the split storyline, beautiful animations take on creepily ghoulish proportions. Gorgeous illustrations fragment into decaying visuals—flowers wither and blacken, dread—skeletons, maggots. Providing relief is Terry Jacks’s 1974 “Seasons in the Sun” and Charlie Janiaut’s score: “We had joy, we had fun, We had seasons in the sun, But the hills that we climbed, Were just seasons out of time.” It seems Vuillemin’s a harbinger of how uncertain a future of mixing machines with the unknown quantity of interrelating humans is when expanded on the internet.