Little Otik
dir. Jan Svankmajer
Opens Fri Feb 8 at the Varsity.

The other night I dreamed that my gynecologist loaned me a baby, and I took it out for Russian food (blinis and caviar) and then carelessly lost it; the next day I saw Little Otik. This ranks up there with life's stranger omens.

In a contemporary Czech city, Mr. and Mrs. Horak are irrevocably childless. Their landscape is littered with real babies and imagined ones--sold by the pound at the fish market and discovered inside watermelons. It's not much of a surprise, then, when Jan Horak digs up a tree trunk that reminds him of a child, and gives the trunk to his wife, Bozena, who develops an instant maternal obsession. She names him Otik, births and suckles him.

And then, because this is a fairy tale, Otik comes to life, first suckling on his mother's breast and then devouring everything in sight. Soon enough, people begin disappearing. Otik is a hungry boy.

In Czech filmmaker/animator Jan Svankmajer's brown and gray world, the real is not quite real, but real enough. Unfortunately, Little Otik goes on long enough that it suppresses some of its own power. All you need to know is in the film's first half: that the things you love will eventually devour you.