[Fantastic Fest 2020 Review] The Old Man: The Movie Finds Progressivism in the Bowels of a Bear

“I’m not completely sure what I just watched,” I thought to myself after finishing the claymation The Old Man: The Movie. Knowing it was based on a series of web shorts released over the past six years, I went on a YouTube search and watched a few of them. That didn’t really help either, though it gave me an idea of the type of punchline humor that the writers/directors Oskar Lehemaa, Mikk Mägi would employ in their feature length debut. 

Like Adult Swim on crack, The Old Man: The Movie is a string of nonsequiturs and comedic vignettes held together by the flimsiest of narratives.  

After an old school PSA informing us of the dangers of an unmilked cow (complete with a National Anthem-styled song about how “milk is our responsibility), three kids named Mart Priidik and Aino are dropped off at their grandpa’s house for the summer. Their grandpa is the town’s milker, a job of very high importance. Every morning, the villagers show up, pleading for the milker to squirt the precious liquid into their empty jars. And while Grandpa immediately sets his grandchildren to work, a creepy man watches from a distance.

The creepy man is called The Old Milker and he once did what Grandpa does now...until one day when his cow got out of the barn and wouldn’t produce milk, resulting in a nuclear explosion of milk that completely rearranged The Old Milker’s anatomy. After that fateful encounter, his veins flow with buttermilk, he sweats sour cream and cries tears of vanilla ice cream. He grouses that the villagers no longer remember how dangerous milking is and decides he must save the townspeople from themselves and a potential Lactocalypse. 

So when the three children take pity on the cow and untie her, she leaves the town and sparks a cowhunt that sends Grandpa, Aino and Priidik on a race against a chainsaw-wielding, motorized wheelchair driving The Old Milker and a ticking time bomb of an udder that could destroy everything…

I’ve written the above description multiple times because The Old Man: The Movie is an absurdist’s wet dream (I’m talking milk, you sicko) and I’m not sure it’s meant to be summed up, just experienced for the insanity of it all. It has a very specific kind of humor that viewers will either click with or be immediately put off by. The good news is that it won’t matter because after each narrative punchline, The Old Man: The Movie is already on its way towards another. From a hippy festival an organizer tries to keep under control when the cow shows up and someone accidentally walks into her horn to a lecherous Tree God with a gaping and cavernous hole in the base that it wants people to drive their tractors or buses into, the film plays one-upmanship with itself, scene after scene.

But it’s actually the smaller, more subtle moments that really got me laughing, ironically. For example, The Old Milker shows up at the hippie music festival by chainsawing through the back of the stage while the DJ watches with bemused apathy, covering his glass of beer to protect it from the flying sawdust. Another moment that had me smiling was when a festival goer walks straight into the cow’s horns, the cow sort of fixates one of its eyes on the viewer with a mix of befuddlement that screams, “oh, bother.” 

Oskar Lehemaa and Mikk Mägi have a knack for visual storytelling and pack so many little visual flourishes and background mayhem that it warrants paying attention to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. And while the characters are rather low-fi balls of clay that don’t have working mouths, the claymation on display is quite phenomenal and filled with style. The Old Milker is a wheelchair bound monstrosity that is always milky wet, with strands of the white cream pouring down his face and hands. And the animals give a middle finger to the Aardman-styled, family friendly Wallace and Gromit/Shaun the Sheep while still maintaining a sense of character. 

Tying these vignettes together is a story that accidentally tries to have a greater theme. As the chainsaw-wielding The Old Milker sets off on his quest to behead the cow, he runs into a trio of out-of-work sawmill employees. It’s a moment of real pathos as one of the Sawmill Men mentions how he lost his fingers in a Sawmill accident and, as a result, lost his job, his wife and his eight kids. “Life is hard. So god damn hard,” he says, wistfully. And, later, the trio sigh and say, “Work is work. A Man’s gotta work” in relation to their current, cow-killing enterprise. There’s also a sense of youthful idealism versus the older generation’s desire to maintain a status quo. While Priidik is stuck in the bowels of a giant bear (yes, you read that right), he realizes that the town’s obsession with milk (“who even drinks milk!”), old time traditions and his grandfather’s treatment of the cow are what lead them to this predicament in the first place.

The bear then defecates Priidik and a stable of animals. 

Because when given the choice between making a statement or going for a punchline, Oskar Lehemaa and Mikk Mägi are more apt to go for the punchline. So while a feeling of progressivism sometimes punctuates the jokes, The Old Man: The Movie is staunchly in the scatalogical, lowbrow corner. It can all be summed up by poor Priidik, railing against his grandfather and the social system that put him in the bowels of the bear: “[Grandpa] thinks it’s all right because it’s always been this way. But I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to end up blowing up in a bear’s ass!”

None of us do, Priidik.