The Human Hibernation

What if humans hibernated, just like some animals? This fictional idea is assumed and realised on the screen by Anna Cornudella Castro. She pays enormous attention to the details and, if this isn’t enough to literally speak of science-fiction, we can certainly say that The Human Hibernation is an accurate and almost objective fiction, whose realism lies fundamentally on its decisive focus on perception and sensibility.

The experiential dimension prevails on the descriptive or explicative ones, which creates the strength of the film. Embodying the point of view of experience, this film is able to handle the recurrent themes of animism and the more-than-human perspective – recurrent in at least contemporary art and cinema – in a convincing manner. It is rare in film to find such an intense expression of the feeling of being connected to Earth, and the sense of continuity between humans and animals.

In fact, animals are constantly present, but not without a typically animal ambiguity between company and threat. Consequently, the film oscillates between idyll and nightmare, between harmony and harshness: the harshness of nature, which is far from being idealised. Without explicitly presenting speculative elements, nature appears to also be the custodian of a transcendental sense, one of truth or wisdom that seems to be contained somewhere in a hidden place on/in Earth.

In this respect, it is the narrative dimension of the film that is able to stress this transcendental sense, for The Human Hibernation not only lingers on feelings and atmospheres but, at its very beginning, introduces a narrative line, which remains open until the last minutes of the film: a little child awakens alone from this hibernation state, probably too early, and gets lost in the cold of winter; his sister, Carla, searches for him later, this search constituting a sort of exclusive, non-organic element that risks breaking the deterministic flow of the natural rhythms. The human affective bond seems to emerge as possibly exceptional here, but finally becomes the way to hint at the pond as a mysterious receptacle of the global bond of nature – at least in my interpretation.

What I perceived as a genuinely alien element in the organic world of nature that the film both inhabits and expresses is not really the reference to the eventually magical powers of nature, or the human affective bond, but the words, inasmuch as they are spoken in American English in the occasional dialogues of the film. Feeling a specific language as a foreign body in a natural realm, where humans and animals should stay at the same level, can be considered as evidence for the classical argument of language being the specific feature of human beings, but it could also be considered as a confirmation of this argument working silently and previously in my perception. Let’s reformulate this doubt in the form of a question: should a film where humans are experienced at the same level as animals be necessarily silent? Is the more-than-human perspective required to be a silent one? Should the perfect continuity of nature have no words to say?

The child (the brother) has probably sunk into the silent pond; the silent gaze of the cows will protect this fatal secret. Carla hibernates again. It is up to us to intuit it as a utopic dream or an ominous nightmare – or both.