WELCOME TO DOLLY’S HOUSE

The film starts with a marriage proposal in the Paris catacombs. Talk about my dream life. Princess Maria is a rising YouTuber, a ghost-debunking influencer whose life itself is already a performance. She has a vlog with her partner, A-Yue (aka Flawless Florist – yes, yes, you can see where it’s going) entitled Weird Channel. Princess Maria has an endearing personality, but she also is eager to please, and plays a submissive role in their relationship that clashes with her partner’s more stoic, coldly controlling nature.

After the catacombs debacle, with the channel losing momentum, Princess Maria receives a video of a disappearing girl. In the background, she notices Madam Dolly, a very famous dollmaker who creates custom, one-of-a-kind dolls. Maria has always owned one of those extremely rare dolls, called Yaya. And in a twist of fate, Madam Dolly is back in Taiwan for the first time in decades to throw a party. Maria has to be there. She and A-Yue engineer access to Dolly’s house because each sees an opportunity in this mythical place very few have entered. Once inside the mansion, however, Maria’s sense of self begins to unravel – helped along by a French-speaking child, much to this French programmer’s delight. Surreal nightmares. Identity crisis. The deeper Maria goes, the more the house forces her to reconsider every relationship she has ever had, and who or what has decided what she could and should become.

Taiwan’s first major rotoscoped 2D animated feature is a true visual proposition. The slightly uncanny movements serve the story and themes to a T, carrying the film through a slow descent from mystery into gothic horror. Drawing on an “awakening doll” story from the Taiping Guangji tradition, Seven Ych, Rady Fu, & Tree Muta have created a singular, ambitious, visually rich object, with genuinely unsettling ideas about performance, ownership and the need to belong. When you’ve spent your life performing for others, how do you know who you are? (SONIA DROULHIOLE)