'Rat Film': Superb, Formally Inventive Documentary Smells A Rat — And It Is Us
Shh. Listen! Hear that faint scampering sound outside your window? The pitter-patter of tiny paws and huge, undiscerning appetites? The screech of a potential disease-carrier? Do you live in a city? It's probably a rat. But try to resist the urge to freak out, fellow citizen â at least until you watch the superb new documentary Rat Film, and can determine for yourself who between us is the true parasite of society.
Whatever you think is, it's not, came out last year, if you really need to watch a parade of unfeeling monster rodents getting whacked). He has, instead, crafted a thoughtful, dialectic essay about Baltimore, and urban centers more broadly, showing how one city's efforts to do something like control its pest problem can illuminate its government's impersonal, even inhumane, approach to its own people. All this from one night-vision image of a rat trying to jump out of a trash can that has been designed to be just big enough to contain it.
