2551.01 - The Kid

One-hundred years lie between Chaplin’s first feature-length film and Pfaffenbichler’s very loose interpretation of it. The Kid, filmed in 1920, is a story from the realm of the "lumpenproletariat", a tragi-comic moral tale of an abandoned child and police brutality. 2551.01 is all of that, too—and is, after all, at a distance of 100 years and all kinds of breaks in cinematic history and countless wars from Chaplin’s bittersweet patchwork comedy. The director calls his toxic genre blend a “dystopic slapstick film.” Pfaffenbichler has already shaped two of his short films from Chaplin material, and the “daemonic screen” is...