Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Fri 3 Feb only

We’ve all made mistakes that fill us with such uncontrollable regret that we feel our entire world is about to collapse around us, and yet somehow life carries on and with it, so do we. Not so for Mr Christie who, consumed with confusion and quiet despair, decides that the only way to overcome having been seduced by a man is to dig his way to Australia. After unwittingly killing God, Mr Christie has to race to save his wife and destroy the man who has taken everything away from him before he and the rest of the universe disappears into oblivion.

Directed by Phil Mulloy, the animation is a minimalist combination of silhouettes and cut-outs that are crudely put together in their simplest, rawest forms. The voice audios have been edited to sound as if they’ve been spoken by a computer while still somehow maintaining a natural element. This apparent stripping back of emotion in fact has the opposite effect; despite at all times being understated, decidedly flat and lacking passion, it is the emotion that takes prominence. Full of dark humour and critical caricatures, all of Mulloy’s characters are recognisably human, from disillusioned teenager Terry to ever-so-nice Mrs Christie, making the film’s essence very ‘everyman’.

At some points realistic, at others full of dream-like fantasy, the plot constantly veers in unexpected directions in a scribble of a narrative. Despite its bizarre essence, the random jumps between scenes are often too unexplained, and it can be hard to find a sense of where the story is heading and why. As a prequel to Mulloy’s award-winning Dead But Not Buried, there is a feeling of having to get to a specific end point, rather than allowing it to reach a more natural conclusion, which distracts from an otherwise subversive and condemnatory film.