I Lost My Body is the profoundly vapid tale of a man (Hakim Faris) and his hand. The hand has been chopped off and as it travels through a computer animated Paris, the film flashes back to Faris’s tale and, presumably, how he lost his hand.
Along the way, the hand kills a young mother and terrorizes a family, while Faris concentrates on stalking Victoire Du Bois. Faris is a pizza delivery guy and a bad one. During one of his failed outings, he meets Du Bois over the intercom and stalks her to her place of work, then home—or so Faris thinks—but instead finds a way to insert himself into her life via a sickly uncle, Patrick d'Assumçao.
Also important is Faris’s tragic backstory—he distracted his parents while they were driving, resulting in a car accident and killing them and shipping him off to poor relations.
Body doesn’t have anything going for it—not the direction, as Clapin seems to think he’s composing his shots for live action or at least CGI, then relying on computer shadow effects for the “hand style” animation. If you don’t mind your precious being insincere, I guess it could be worse. It could actually cause nausea to watch.
Similarly insincerely precious is Dan Levy’s music. Not “Schitt’s” Dan Levy. Another Dan Levy. One who does fine enough montage music just on bad projects.
The script’s terrible and profoundly unaware of itself. When the third act hints at some amazing possible turns of events before the film chickens out of all of them, there’s a moment where I Lost My Body might actually achieve something. Albeit something related to its stalker, toxically masculine hero, but at least it’d be trying. Instead it gives up, which is what everyone should do when confronted with the possible viewing of I Lost My Body.
Give up.
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