Film Review: DUST BATH: Ambient Animated Short Offers Up Kentucky Fried Dread [TIFF 2021]

Dust Bath Review

Dust Bath (2021) Film Review from the 20th Annual Toronto International Film Festival, a short film written, directed, and animated by Seth A. Smith.

Seth A. Smith, the multi-hyphenate artist behind Fantasia’s audacious body horror knockout Tin Can, is back on the Canadian festival circuit, but this time with something much shorter … and much more animated, to boot.

He may be off to a fresh start with Dust Bath, premiering in one of TIFF’s Short Cuts programs, but Smith is still on the same general grind: one of an eerie and unshakable sense of existential dread. However, there is a slight change of tempo this time around, because instead of showing us that dread through the recognizable lens of human scientists we’re experiencing it through the eyes of, well, a chicken.

Animated in a rotoscope fashion and layered with a droning ambient score, we watch as both a white and gray chicken (whom the film credits to three different birds: Lennart, Star, and Stripe) cluck and strut around an overgrown meadow on the outskirts of the woods, foraging for food and cooling off in the dirt. While the gray chicken goes about its business completely unperturbed, the white one is a bit more reluctant. Thanks to the subtitles that translate its clucking into decipherable human language, we learn that it is experiencing a metaphysical dilemma wherein it desires to survive … but also to be eaten alive.

It seems preposterous to ascribe such self-awareness and psychological depth to an animal that even with its head detached would still be capable of running around on its own, but that core sense of ridiculousness highlights the dark undercurrents within this short’s train of thought. A chicken wrestling with its own mortality is kinda funny, and yet the chicken also … makes some very cogent points?

Its thoughts trigger our own existentialist senses and remind us of the effervescent dread that fluctuates along our own psychological peripheries. Sure, we may not be as instinctually afraid of the unseen beasts hiding amongst the dark brambles as our chicken friend is, but is it safe to say that we are afraid of the unknowns that exist within the expanses of our own lives, as well as our inability to predict and/or prevent them?

Or maybe, like the chicken, we also have a perversely destructive streak that pushes us to seek those unknowns out, to ride the wave of adrenaline that precedes their approach ­– a death drive, if you will. And being called out on that is so unsettling, because we don’t want to recognize that in ourselves.

So ultimately, Dust Bath posits a laugh from us … but is it in lieu of a chicken’s sense of morbid existentialism, or is it as a coping mechanism because it’s all too relatable? Or is this just a cute chicken cartoon that I’m looking way too deeply into? I guess you’ll have to be the arbiter of that yourself.

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