Review from Next Projection
It’s not just the broken elevator of the film’s singular setting that contributes a sense of motionlessness to Old Cats, Pedro Peirano and Sebastián Silva’s delightfully dour domestic comedy. The maintenance issue may be the nominal reason the film’s elderly characters are confined to their eighth-floor apartment, but this is a movie whose integral immobility is more behavioural than bodily: as much as these old folks are restricted to the ever-encroaching walls of their home as the hot Chilean day wanes on, the engrained stubbornness on which the bulk of the comedy is built gives them even less mental wiggle room than physical.
There’s little comedy here of the laugh-out-loud variety; Peirano and Silva, co-writing their…