Zeria, the new film from Belgian director Harry Cleven, is striking from the first image and only grows more strange and wondrous as it continues. The film’s opening credits play over what look like thick liquid clouds moving through water against a warm orange and pink backlight that seems to announce this movie won’t look like other movies. 

When the film begins in earnest with an aerial shot of a city full of tenement houses overrun by vines and trees that’s clearly made in miniature, that sense of something unique unfolding before our eyes only grows. But the first image of characters in the film is the most surprising, startling, unnerving, and oddly beautiful: the characters in the film are portrayed by human actors wearing unmoving masks. 

A voiceover begins early in the film, and we learn that this voiceover is a message from the last man on Earth to the first human born on Mars, who just so happen to be grandfather and grandson. The grandson is the titular Zeria, but the film centers far more on the grandfather’s life as he recounts to his grandchild his experiences on the dying Earth. 

There’s little dialogue as almost all of the speech comes from our narrator, which lends the film a fairy-tale quality. This quality is helped by the incredibly distinct visual world Cleven and his collaborators have created here. In which every large-scale exterior is made of miniatures, immobile masks are somehow able to convey significant emotion, the world is drained of almost all color, and some of the story plays out in pure silhouette and shadow play. 

The story, such as it is, follows our narrator’s childhood with a brief stop at his teenage years and into his adulthood. It’s an often brutal story, as we learn that his father abused him, physically and mentally, and that he was sent to live with his grandparents, who “no longer knew how to love,” and his aunt and uncle, who may have been a pedophile. And yet this brutality doesn’t play as pure edge or shock factor; it lends real darkness to the story and a real sense of pain as we hear about these things from the man who lived them. 

Beyond the painful experiences of our narrator’s young life, there are also significant sexual moments. These aren’t necessarily sex scenes, though there is a scene of three characters with their hands down each others’ pants, and they are often stranger than that. We see our narrator’s dreams of naked women, puppets in these sequences, tied up and asking to be touched. And the film shows what he, as a young boy, imagines when his aunt describes “a woman being licked by many men,” again with a puppet woman, and many long puppeteered tongues that recall Freddy Krueger’s extended tongue in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. 

Again, these scenes, which are undeniably somewhat shocking, especially given that they’re created with puppets, don’t push the audience out of the film because everything here is so otherworldly. Which makes sense given that this is a sci-fi film. There’s not much that sci fi does in the plot beyond the exodus of humans to Mars, but it informs the film’s aesthetic. 

Late in the film, when we learn about the exodus to Mars, we also learn that older people did not leave Earth. They were left behind to die as they could not contribute to the proliferation of humanity on our new home planet. It’s another plot point that could overwhelm the film in misery, but it sets up its surprisingly moving ending, one that offers a note of hope and joy in the darkness of this world. 

Zeria isn’t just an astounding film for its visual inventiveness, though it is undoubtedly that, but also a beautiful film that seeks to look the brutality of humanity and a crumbling world in the face and acknowledge that there is also love and hope. 

That this emotional note lands, when there is almost no dialogue and none of the character’s faces ever move, speaks to the skill of Cleven and his collaborators as visual and narrative storytellers. More than a movie, Zeria feels like a visual poem.