I think I’m a huge fan of Charlie Kaufman’s brand of introspective cinema. I certainly love his combination of quirk, genuine weirdness, existential terror he managed to blend into movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But there was a loftiness to those films that I just felt Anomalisa didn’t have. It’s a question asked knowing no one can answer, more like a poem than the novels I want from Kaufman.

Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis, this is a stop motion movie, I should mention) is a man living in isolation. He’s on a trip to Cincinnati to speak at a conference, but can’t work up much enthusiasm about that, nor his ritzy hotel or really anything. So alone is he that it sounds like everyone, literally everyone else in the movie, has exactly the same voice – Tom Noonan. He’s not sure if he’s losing his grip or if there’s a massive conspiracy going on, but Michael’s monotone world is definitely pushing him to his breaking point – until he hears another voice: Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman just down the hall.

There are certain traces of one of my favorite movies, Lost in Translation, in Anomalisa. Both tell the stories of older men, deep into dealing with existential crises, who seek revitalization in a younger woman who is staying in the same hotel. But the crisis of Anomalisa is a nightmarish one, despite it often being played for laughs, Michael is genuinely in a bad place and finding a way out won’t be easy.

There are so few stop motion movies these days, and even fewer of them have anatomically correct puppets. Anomalisa is a decidedly adult story, steeped in sophisticated ideas that would probably be quite alarming to a child. Does the story of a customer service expert losing the ability to distinguish between people have to be animated? No, but it’s not for you or I to question such things.

After doing so much wonderfully, Anomalisa really left me hanging with its final scenes. It’s easy to guess that just as indignant as I was, just as confused as Michael, so too was Kaufman, who was probably dealing with his own similar problems and trying to address them by making this movie. I guess the great lesson in all this is you must look for answers within, which is something. Not damn near enough.

I think a lot of us heard something about Hugh Glass sometime after Michael Punke’s novel The Revenant came out about a decade ago. I certainly heard the story about the man who was torn in half by a bear, put back together, left for dead, and crawled six million miles just so he could kill the guys who left him. And sure, a lot of movies are about revenge, but how the hell do you turn that into a film?

One way is to give the project to Alejandro González Iñárritu, hot off of turning a person’s state of mind into an aesthetic in Birdman, and reteaming him with Emmanuel Lubezki, one of the masters of showing insane events from one person’s point-of-view. That’s a good start, what gets them the rest of the way? Well, a script that changes events in smart ways and good performances, of course.

The Revenant is set in the harsh west, the scary, untamed American wilderness of the early 19th Century. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is guiding a band of trappers led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), a man with utmost respect for Glass’ expertise. Their group includes Glass’ Native American son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), another boy, roughly the same age, named Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the guy who disagrees with everything Glass says, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). The trappers are attacked by an Arikara war party and forced to book it back to the nearest fort, which leads to new route choices, which eventually leads to Glass ending up between a bear and her cubs.

There’s no coincidence that the bear which mauls Glass is trying to protect her offspring, one thing The Revenant is about is a parent’s instinct to protect their child. We’ll soon learn that the leader of the Arikara is looking for his daughter, who was kidnapped by white men. Similarly, Glass’ great motivation throughout the film is his son, who he is ready to die to protect. It’s a safe choice, since revenge movies about dudes trying to save/avenge their wives/sons/daughters have a long track record of success in Hollywood, but I wonder if what could have been a pure story of survival needed to be turned into this.

Plus, it’s not that The Revenant is even solely about the toxic nature of revenge. This movie has a loftier ambition: to show just how hard it is for humans to survive in nature. We forget how powerful the earth is, we romanticize it – pretty flowers and sunsets and all that. When we speak of nature’s danger, we focus on disasters like floods or earthquakes. But even just cold of winter was enough to kill people for pretty much all of human history. During one pivotal scene, a character is shot to death and then immediately an avalanche falls in the background, as if mother nature is roaring “you people have nothing on me.”

An adventure this big deserves to be seen on the big screen, and that’s the legacy of The Revenant to me. As much as I respected to work done by DiCaprio and Hardy, it was the commitment to filming outside using only natural light that wowed me the most. That I think this is the best shot movie in a year that Sicario came out is hopefully a testament to how well Iñárritu and Lubezki honor the old film axiom “show, don’t tell.” They show us a harsh world that we tried to hide from in our apartments, malls, and parks.

Life is bleak and short and hard and it can get ripped away from you in an instant unless you’re willing to fight to hold onto it. I love a lot of stories that try to tell us that there’s a beauty in that, but this is the opposite. The Revenant shows that it’s an ugly, hopeless struggle. You have to measure yourself against that fact. Does it make you want to quit, or does it make you want to fight even harder?