Movies A review of "Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers"

[Naltic]

A Fever Dream Done Well​

*slight spoilers ahead, and important to note, most of this review is from the one I wrote on IMDb, I just pasted it here and tweaked it a bit as I felt there were slight changes that I wanted to make*

"Kame wa igai to hayaku oyogu", or in English, "Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers", is a movie that presents this story about your average housewife who has lived the most average life, finding a random poster for becoming a spy in her average day and then spiralling down this rabbit hole of what life means and what it means to be average. To her, being average was all that she knew, all that her life was, but by being presented with this chance and taking it, it made her question herself and question what it means to truly be "average."

The more the days passed from her being a spy, the more she realised and started experiencing this otherworld that she had never seen, even though it was inside the same world she had lived in her entire life. The rules of being a spy are being inconspicuous and "average"; the more "average" you are, the better a spy you are, and so by her being, by nature, "average", she was the best and yet at the same time, by her realising this, the more "unique" she became. And it's this that the movie is tangling with, the dichotomy of what it means to be average and what it means to be unique. If you are average and yet live in a world where you know you need to be average, are you then average or unique? By simply knowing what nobody else seems to realise?

The movie, to me, sought to answer this question by showing that from the start, nobody is "average", and that everybody is unique and that those who think themselves "average" have simply been told that they are and have only lived their lives knowing that to be the truth. This is shown by the main characters best friend being what is seen to be the personification of the term "unique", she exceled at everything and yet in the end she realised that by her having this "freedom" life became worse than being average because you are not tied down to what society makes you and as such you can't become what you truly want and in some sense fight against the norm because you are constantly, wether you want to or not, fighting against yourself and with what you want to do. Because if you are given an endless amount of options to choose from and not have to be forced into choosing, then how will you know what to choose? Of course, one may opt to choose what one likes, but this here is what the movie silently tangles with, because how do you know what you truly like? More often than not, you will just end up doing random things that, at the end of the day, won't bring you any closer to what you truly want. By the main character being "average", and by the wacky things she ended up doing in the movie, we come to realise that, at the end of the day, it's better to live a life that's "average" but still fulfilling, and that, so long as you enjoy and do wacky things for the sake of doing them and enjoying them, then you have truly succeed at life and that you have won.

The movie, quite importantly and uniquely, tells this whole narrative that I spoke about in such a fever-dream-esque way. There is no clear-cut linear story per se, it's more of random events that happen for no reason, but they all feel so wacky and weird and fit so neatly into the overarching story that to me it makes sense. Of course, it's not everybody's cup of tea, but to me, I like this experimental storytelling quite a bit, and I think that's what makes the movie unique in its own way.

To me, this movie is a solid 9.5/10; of course, objectively speaking, it's more of a 7/10, but to me, it taught this lesson that not many movies teach, and it did it in such a unique and weird way that one can't help but find it at the very least interesting. It's a fun movie to watch and one I can recommend for the simple fact of how goofy and weird it is. It's bliss and happiness personified into a movie.