I Lost My Body (2019)

I Lost My Body (2019) is an animated drama/fantasy that follows two parallel stories that gradually converge: Naoufel, a lonely young man nursing a tender crush on a librarian named Gabrielle, and a severed hand that escapes a Parisian dissection lab and embarks on a perilous journey across the city to find its missing body. As the hand fends off pigeons, rats and the elements, flashes of memory—Naoufel’s childhood, his mistakes and his yearning for connection—begin to explain how the separation happened and what a reunion might mean. Watching the film is an unusual, often startling experience: visually inventive and at times grotesque, it balances darkly comic action sequences with quietly poetic, melancholic moments. The animation emphasizes texture and atmosphere, giving the city of Paris a lived-in, dreamlike quality while the storytelling moves between present danger and intimate recollection. Themes of loss, identity, fate and the physicality of longing are explored with both tenderness and a sharp emotional honesty. Expect a contemplative, art-house ride rather than a conventional animation: tense and suspenseful during the hand’s odyssey, and tender and bittersweet in the human story. The result is hauntingly beautiful, oddly moving, and memorably original—based on Guillaume Laurant’s novel "Happy Hand."

Actors: Hakim Faris, Victoire Du Bois, Patrick d'Assumçao

Director: Jérémy Clapin

Runtime: 81 min

Genres: Animation, Drama, Fantasy

7.0 /10 81 /100 7.5 /10 7.5 /10