She Is Conann

Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director Bertrand Mandico extravagantly extrapolates on the themes and situation of his 2023 short film Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley with this hallucinatory existential epic about survival in a world of relentless brutality and failed attempts at civilization. At once dazzling and baffling, monotonous and perversely imaginative, She Is Conann is more a conceptual, aesthetic experience than it is a narrative one, placing a firm emphasis on variations on themes, painstaking visual design, and practical effects, while exhibiting a flamboyant nonchalance with regard to its nonstop squishy, squelching, spraying displays of bloodshed and vomit.

Following the introduction of a framing device in which the elderly Queen Conann (Françoise Brion) looks back on her life’s journey as she prepares for her own spectacularly grotesque demise at the hands of surgeons in pink silk (think Barbie meets Dead Ringers), She Is Conann’s chronology begins in ancient Cimmeria, where our first Conann (Claire Duburcq) is a child traumatized by having witnessed her mother being bisected by marauders and is then forced to eat Mom’s bloody, still-beating heart. Conann is thereafter enslaved by the hot, evil Sanja (Julia Riedler), who schools the young girl in the art of combat and becomes the object of Conann’s desire and vows of revenge. Child Conann eventually meets and is murdered by twentysomething Conann (Christa Théret), who eventually meets and is murdered by thirtysomething Conann (Sandra Parfait), at which point our multifaceted protagonist is catapulted into the Bronx in the late 1990s, before the subsequent incarnation, who once again murders her predecessor, finds herself in some near-future corporate netherworld, which brings us back to Queen Conann and her plans for post-human transcendence. The final scenes mirror the transgression with which the film began: ritual cannibalism.