The passage from Leviticus 26 that opens the film foreshadows the world of Mad God, a realm under divine wrath. The “Last Man” continually sends “Assassins” into the seemingly bottomless depths, where they encounter tiny dwarf-like creatures, tortured giants spewing waste, and monsters that casually dismember others.
Mad God unsettles our assumptions about life and humanity. Its beings are born, labor, devour and are devoured, and die, without any noble will to survive or grand cause to justify their actions. Other lives simply take their place, making death part of an indifferent cycle rather than a tragic event. In such a world, the distinction between human and nonhuman also begins to falter. The human and nonhuman, living and mechanical, organic and inanimate become entangled until it is difficult to say what can be called human at all. The film thus overturns the convention of defining the “nonhuman” in relation to the human, presenting a world in which humanity is no longer its center or measure.
Created over more than thirty years by Phil Tippett, whose career in stop-motion and visual effects includes Star Wars and RoboCop, Mad God combines stop-motion with live action to construct its grotesque world. The sudden appearance of cult filmmaker Alex Cox in live action creates a jarring contrast with the stop-motion realm, accentuating the divide between the worlds above and below. But this formal contrast also brings the temporality of stop-motion into the film itself. Built frame by frame, stop-motion embodies an accumulation of time that resonates with the ceaseless cycle of birth and death within the film, leaving a lingering impression.