‘Kibbles’ follows a story that we are so very familiar with – the story of a man dealing with his own self and own insecurities, the story of the outcast trying his best to become one of the many. The story of David is not a singular one in literature or cinematography, there are similar cases where the main character tries to find out things about themselves, tries to be an individual, a ‘one’.
‘Kibbles’ has some very strong points that really got us, and we have to take a little bit of time to focus on all of them. The dialogue of ‘Kibbles’ is engaging, having the same structure as the dialogue Chuck Palahniuk or J. G. Ballard used in their novels. And speaking of Palahniuk, it is really hard not to see the distinctive couple – ‘Marla Singer and the narrator’ from ‘Fight Club’ reproduced here. David deals with a hard moment in his life and all he needs is someone to show him a certain way. At one point, a mysterious woman appears and from that moment on, his life gets on a new path. He is intrigued by this, and at the same time, he has many moments when he is in a complete disagreement with her. He does not know if what she is or what she says to be is one hundred percent true, or if it’s the right thing to do/follow at the moment. Based on the similarities with Palahniuk’s characters and novel, we really expected to see David doing something brutal and out of the normal timeline, but it wasn’t the case. David has his own way of dealing with problems, and for us, it was really surprising to see the outcome of this film.
There are some minor stylistic issues in the editing part of ‘Kibbles’ that were perceived as faulty by us at first. As the story went by, we understood the role of them as the narrative was building up on the ashes of a story that had to die to make room for the new one to bloom entirely. Mauro Paolino had an idea and trusted it long enough to make it a feature film. ‘Kibbles’ is about addiction, love, loneliness, sadness and resurrection and therefore each and every one of us could relate to it somehow. If it doesn’t happen to us, we at least have a friend that went through this, and now we can see it as a universal theme, a theme that will hopefully go on the ‘classics’ hall of fame in the near future.
TMFF RATING: