Funded by the Hubert Bals Fund, which is designed to support innovative films, Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine is Alex Piperno’s directorial debut. It’s categorised in the fantasy/romance genre and Piperno has a pretty interesting take on that.

In stark contrast to the fantasy movies that have been churned out over the past few years, where fantasy makes the story, Window Boy takes an underlying perspective where the ordinary happenings and intersections of life play out to be fantastical.

You have a group of farmers, a deckhand, a woman and her apartment, and water pipes exploding in a non-linear chain of events. All of these are connected by a Shrodinger-like thread that you can’t seem to follow, leaving you wondering if the problem lies in your uncultured self or the filmmaker.

It might be easier to come to a conclusion when Piperno tells you that it’s not actually meant to make sense; the film is just as much about seeing the invisible in the visible as it is about not overstraining your eyes. Most things just don’t make sense and they don’t need to. (If they do, there’s the fantasy element for you…!)

The film does have a frustrating lack of structure and an even bigger lack of a coherent narrative. But Piperno’s apathy towards either of those is honest, and frankly, quite an apt reflection of life. It helps that the characters are developed well throughout the film—character motivations are detailed enough to move the story along, but written with enough ambiguity such that each character is almost representative of an entire subgroup or subculture.

Overall, Window Boy affords one plenty of room for abstract interpretation and imagination. If you imagine that you might get a thrill out of that, then go ahead and give it a watch! If not, you might be better off throwing it out of the window.

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Xi Ning is a creative working in the intersections of the media, arts, and social sectors. She sees film reviewing as a way of communication, although she’s still not so sure who exactly she’s communicating to.