By Alice Johnson
In Danse Macabre, the body becomes scripture. Drawing on Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, Yoruba cosmology, and fragments of global performance history, the film is a visual experiment and calls to be witnessed by all. It is a hybrid of poetry, dance, archival sound, and ritual, this is cinema as séance, unfolding less as a narrative and more as a visceral excavation of the human psyche.
Directed with bold abstraction, Danse Macabre presents the conscious and unconscious as living, breathing forces, performed by dancers, voiced by unseen speakers, and animated by a score that slips between traditional rhythms and contemporary electronic music. The film resists categorization, intentionally. It is at once a choreo-poem, an installation, a recall of the past with the archival footages, a ritual offering, and an intellectual treatise on the state of being.
At its centre lies a philosophical inquiry; how do we embody memory, grief, desire, power? What do ancient cosmologies and modern psychology share when it comes to the shape of the soul? The Yoruba Egúngún masquerade, with its deeply encoded ancestral wisdom, provides a spiritual anchor. Swirling fabrics, deliberate footwork, the sound of the talking drum; these become acts of remembering, of conjuring what’s been buried under the weight of modernity and its illusions of progress.
Jungian motifs such as the ego, the shadow, and the collective unconscious are not illustrated but danced—stretched, bent, and ruptured across frames. The body here becomes a site of knowledge and tension. A dancer contorts while a voice murmurs about nationalism and the collective ego. A singer exhales over a minimalist beat as archival political broadcasts crash through. At one point, a slow-motion solo is scored with whispers about “responsible privilege” and “measuring the frequency of love”—themes that run through the director’s stated manifesto on “embodied living.”
The film’s intertextuality is rich and unapologetic. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal flickers in the margins, its silent Death figure mirrored in the stillness of a masked performer. Marina Abramović’s radical performance endurance lingers in the extended takes. Even the chaos of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique echoes in the film’s more frenzied, almost ecstatic segments, where chaos becomes catharsis.
Danse Macabre is certainly ambitious, it will not be accessible to everyone. It challenges the audience to abandon linearity, to sit in discomfort, and to decode symbols that often refuse fixed meaning. But this is by design. The film’s power lies in its refusal to be didactic. Instead, it invites interpretation, participation, and reflection.
As part of the Durban International Film Festival’s 2025 programme, Danse Macabre finds resonance within a continental conversation around the body, memory, and the decolonisation of knowledge. It reflects DIFF’s commitment to curating works that push the form, that refuse binaries—between past and present, art and ritual, the seen and the unseen.
In the end, Danse Macabre does not seek to answer a query or offer a solution. It exists as art addressing the problem. It offers a mirror. And in doing so, it reclaims performance not just as art, but as ancestral, psychological, and political work.
Danse Macabre is part of the official selection at the 46th Durban International Film Festival, screening from 17–27 July 2025, with additional outreach screenings in Cape Town and Johannesburg to follow. For details on screening times and venues, visit ccadiff.ukzn.ac.za.
Catch the film at DIFF: https://ccadiff.ukzn.ac.za/diff46/danse-macabre/
Screening Schedule:
18 Jul 17:00 Ballito Junction
25 Jul 17:00 Suncoast 6
This review emanates from the Talent Press programme, an initiative of Talents Durban in collaboration with the Durban FilmMart Institute and FIPRESCI. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author (Alice Johnson) and cannot be considered as constituting an official position of the organisers.
