Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A silent figure known as The Assassin travels through a nightmare underworld of tortured souls, ruined cities and wretched monstrosities forged from the primordial horrors of the unconscious mind of Phil Tippett, the world's preeminent stop-motion animator.
Mad God is Phil Tippett's decades-in-the-making stop-motion fever dream — a singular, nearly wordless descent through a grotesque underworld. Its cinematography and visual craft are genuinely extraordinary, with handmade textures, layered nightmare imagery, and a density of invention that rivals any animated film ever made. Novelty is off the charts: there is simply nothing else like it. The plot, however, is deliberately opaque to the point of near-incoherence — more tone poem than narrative — and 'acting' in the traditional sense is absent (the silent figures serve the surrealist vision rather than performing). The ending, while appropriately strange and cyclical, leaves some viewers cold in its abstraction. Overall a visionary work that earns its cult status on craft alone.