Welcome to Foreign Film February 2025. I started the month off with a bang, watching three movies over the weekend. Then I got busy and distracted and forgot to actually write about them. Here we are nearly one week into this, the shortest of months, and I have neither watched any other movies nor written anything.

Hopefully, the rest of the month will go better. But considering…well *waves hands frantically in all directions*…everything else going on in the world, I wouldn’t count on it.

The Vanished Elephant is a beautiful, strange, moody, and confounding neo-noir mystery that questions the very fabric of the story it is telling the longer it is spun.

Edo Celeste (Salvador del Solar) is a successful crime writer who has decided to end his long-running detective series. Naturally, as these things go, a real-life mystery forms. New clues have come to light which might let him understand what happened to his fiancee who disappeared several years prior.

He keeps finding packages full of photographs which, when placed together in a certain order will reveal a much larger picture. There is a whole complicated procedure that I did not at all understand that led him to figure out in what order to place the photographs.

Some murders happen. He investigates on his own despite the real police constantly telling him not to. Eventually, he will become a suspect.

As the film progresses this fairly standard mystery formula begins to dissolve to be replaced by an even bigger mystery about the nature of story and reality. To say more would be to spoil its many surprises.

Ultimately, it didn’t work that well for me. I found it more unintelligible than mysterious. It is definitely a film that will work better for the viewer on a second viewing as you’ll likely discover details that will help you understand what it is doing. I’m just not sure I care enough to give it another go.

It is well-made and quite beautiful to look at. It reminded me a bit of David Lynch’s movies, but that might just be because he just died and I’ve been thinking about him of late. But it does have that beautiful weirdness about it.