Mismantler (2025)

Mismantler had its world première at the Cork International Film Festival, 14 November 2025

Mixing and remixing found sounds, samples, musique concrète, electronica, industrial sensibilities and tunes often played on discarded toys, reclaimed instruments and malfunctioning pedals, the musical entity known as Nurse With Wound, featuring Steven Stapleton and an assortment of guests, is fully committed to the notion of recycling. Recycling is also at the heart of Andrew Keogh and Stapleton’s experimental feature Mismantler, which not only tracks a strange, grumbling man as he sorts through the detritus of a post-apocalyptic world, but also boasts a customised Nurse With Wound score that repurposes and reassembles snippets of previous tracks (like Astral Dustbin Dirge from Homotopy To Marie, 1982, In Swollen Silence from Soundpooling, 2009 or Lunar Cement Sidewalk from An Awkward Pause, 1999) into new material. Needless to say, the resulting soundscape – rumbling, ominous, absurdist, ever present – is astonishing.

There is also, in the opening shot of Mismantler, a cat – but lying amid a sea of empty cat-food tins, it is dead and desiccated. This would appear to be alluding to the dead cat which was famously used in a missing scene from Eraserhead (1977), much as a later shot in Mismantler of the sun aligning with a barren planet alludes to the opening of David Lynch’s feature debut. For Eraserhead, which has been repeatedly referenced in Nurse With Wound’s music over the years, belongs, like Mismantler, to the ‘muttering man’ subgenre that also includes Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven (1993) and Keane (2004), David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), Anders Elsrud Hultgreen’s Dawn (Morgenrøde, 2014), Tobias Nölle’s Aloys (2016), Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2017), Matthew Holness’ Possum (2018), Tim Mielants’ Patrick (2019) and Marc Fouchard’s Out Of The World (Hors du monde, 2020). These are films in which an alienated male protagonist moves with equal curiosity and confusion through a strange, menacing world that is as much a reflection of his inner state as an external reality.

The Mismantler certainly is a muttering man – all guttural grunts, groans and guffaws, mumbles, moans and murmurs, wheezes and hacking coughs, like an old drunk, an aphasic patient or someone who has spent far too much time in his own company. His inarticulate noises – his failure to express himself – point to a meaning that is being constantly deferred and kept beyond the viewer’s grasp. There may also be a narration occasionally delivered by James Worse in the kind of crisp, chirpy, authoritative yet arch voiceover associated with Central Office of Information films – but its words consist entirely of Dada-esque Jabberwocky gibberish, again suggestive of a sense that is just out of reach. Even the film’s title represents a neologistic mangling of known English: for not only is ‘mismantler’ a word formed from parts that have been disassembled and put back together awry, but such dismantlement and random reconfiguration would also appear to be the very activity which the word denotes.

What is this man, in his bright-red MAPFRE Asistencia overalls, doing exactly? He walks about, feeds boiled eggs to his dogs, pockets used cigarette butts, forages through the rubbish outside, transfers a blood-like liquid via pipette into buckets, pats his dogs and a pig, acquires a peculiar found object assembled from Lego whose precise purpose and value remain obscure (a reflex for the film), and later swaps it for a similar object, returning the first to a new hiding place in the ground. He also, throughout the film, wears over his head a white muslin sack that waves and pulsates unnaturally as though the face beneath it were constantly mutating. This is, in a way, the true face of a film which is similarly unstable in form, combining  variably cranked handheld tracking shots that are often over-the-shoulder or close-up, and occasional explosions of rapidly cut montage, all disrupted by juddery visual spasms and glitches, uncannily incomplete compositing of shots, canned laughter and digital artefacting.

In one sequence, a found tool that the Mismantler discards freezes in mid-air, and a digital diagram of its design and function appears in the background even as the tool itself dematerialises, its one-time utility now on the scrapheap. The film too thrives on its own lost significance. For it ambles and shambles and shuffles and shifts in all manner of different directions, defying the viewer to unmask its meandering, indeed mismantled meaning. Like the protagonist, we are left to rummage through once-loved relics and defamiliarised signifiers, in search of something whose point is already forgotten and buried. Both the Mismantler’s and the narrator’s inscrutable utterances demand understanding without providing a key.

Not that a key is entirely absent. For much as a dead cat can be a metaphor for political distraction, Mismantler shows the sterile world that will result if we allow ourselves to continue being distracted by petty ambition and acquisitiveness, and wilfully ignore the damage we are doing to the planet. This is spelt out by text which appears at the end of the film, and which, in contrast to the Mismantler’s muted mumblings, is articulated clearly in multiple languages. The text states that the film is ‘for’ certain groups of people – the greedy, those who other, control narratives, blame the poor, and “those people who debase everything to an economic exchange. Those people who can no longer look humans and creatures in the eye.” So there is an economic and ecological thesis here, addressed to a specific target audience.

The question, though, is where our Mismantler, an ambiguous creature, fits into this grander ethical scheme. He might at first seem to be the villain of the piece and the object of the film’s condemnation. After all, he is a hulking, growling, grotesque monster who performs ‘mad scientist’ experiments, and surveys his realm while a speech on the soundtrack in mock-German (with distinctly Hitlerian inflections) depicts him as a demagogic tyrant – even if he is looking out from a house’s broken window over an empty, arid plain, and may indeed be the last man on Earth, without audience.

In any case, the Mismantler seems not really to be any of the things that the film’s closing text critiques, but rather their opposite and antidote. For he treats animals with affection, he gives as much as he takes, and most of all, in times when the effects of excessive consumerism have hit home, he is an avid recycler. And in all his eccentricity and eclecticism, this grumbling gleaner is also, in his way, a figure for that ultimate mismantler, the artist – tinkering and pottering, observing and inspecting, and refashioning the world from its own constituent flotsam and jetsam in a manner that, far from controlling narrative, liberates it from easy analysis. It might even be Mr Stapleton himself under the mask…

strap: Andrew Keogh & Steven Stapleton’s experimental feature tracks a muttering man sorting through the detritus of a post-apocalyptic world

© Anton Bitel