It’s not often that a film tries to create a main character out of rats. Ratatouille gave the furry rodents the Pixar treatment and made them into lovable, misunderstood creatures while Black Plague made them into villainous destroyers.
Another way to look at them, however, is as metaphors for societal deconstruction over the past 100 years. Though it may seem like a stretch, that’s exactly what the new documentary Rat Film does, and it does it quite well. The film explores how rats in Baltimore have lead to racial segregation, but it’s never just that simple. Some scenes are shot completely inside a videogame rat simulator while other segments of the film lead up to a young rat being eaten by a snake.
It’s scenes such as these that can be challenging both graphically and ideologically, but no matter what it all connects back to the message of Baltimore’s racial and housing problems. There are scenes of forensic investigators recreating murder, which at first have seemingly no connection to the rest of the film, but after a while the story becomes more apparent. Filmmaker Theo Anthony is really just trying to show how when you reshape life you can lose the humanity.
This all goes to show how wild this man’s vision of his town is, and how you can see everything as one big spiderweb of connections. It’s a film experience unlike any other because like all groundbreaking films it can’t be easily categorized. This may be a good or bad thing for some, but it’s important to keep in mind one thing: True/False doesn’t show experimental films unless the experiment works.
[youtube url=”https://youtu.be/mDy3Mtot7IA”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93ASUImTedo[/youtube]