Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
The cruelty of crowds, the compassion of the individual. Look how he’s trembling.
A saddening, poetic sequence of misery and futility, of the bestiality of humanity and the utter incompatibility of compassion with a world of such senseless cruelty. And the criminal does not even know he’s a criminal. Here, people are lost in their own selfish strivings, suffering too, though failing to recognise it as a collective pain. Divorced from their roots, devoid of foundation, be it spiritual, devotional, ideological. And what are you afraid of? I’m just afraid. The tortured cries of the donkey are echoed in the fearful whimpers of Marie; and so the animal and human suffer alike, both silent in their sorrows, shouldering on in their stoicism, crying internally for some scrap of salvation. It is a tragic tale, loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot; a story of a christ-like figure, a holy fool, whose humility is overlooked as naivety, whose purity is trampled on by the cruelty of the world he inhabits. He loves his sorrow more than us — and it is indeed Dostoyevsky who signalled that man is sometimes extraordinarily in love with his own suffering.
You see the path, our names carved on the bench, our games with Balthazar. But I see nothing. I’ve no heart, no tenderness, no feelings. What you say is only words... reality is something else.