If animation film Kill It and Leave This Town resembles anything, then a dark version of Fantasia ★★★☆☆

A small purple flame in an otherwise inky space: this is how the Polish animation director Mariusz Wilczynski depicts a smoking man in the opening image of Kill It and Leave This Town. With his wildly drawn, sometimes literally fabricated with tape and crumpled paper, rare unruly dive into his memories of the communist Lódź of the 1960s, his unsightly hometown, painter and set designer Wilczynski won several prizes at animation festivals.

That praise is understandable, because if animation film knows Kill It and Leave This Town actually no equal. In his cinema debut – production time: fourteen years – Wilczynski does with Lódź what David Lynch does with Eraserhead did for Philadelphia: to recreate a city in which the atmosphere is so oppressive, the air to breathe so filthy and heavy, that even the most mundane situations become hallucinatory experiences.

In Kill It and Leave This Town spiders crawl across the floor, flies cling to the window and fish poke their heads out of the ceiling, while the maker himself – a man named Mariusz – wanders through the debris of his past. Moments of deep, presumably unprocessed pain (a visit to his mother on her deathbed) are interspersed with scenes that could also have been from Gummbah. “My goodness, what a crap this is,” says an ancient man trying to solve a crossword puzzle. The overall picture offers a succession of fragments that can perhaps best be described as the world’s darkest performance of fantasy.

It is certainly not pleasant to watch, this parade of ugliness. But where the music is not unambiguous – the spectrum ranges from ashen punk to sugary love ballads – Wilczynski’s images, which are both unique and hermetically closed, also offer glimmers of hope.