The Bleacher: A Dark Display of Guilt
By Al Fontanilla
The Bleacher is a gruesome and upsetting display that while at first feels like senseless surrealism, presents a thought-provoking consideration of reactionary violence and guilt. The titular character sports crackled, ghostly skin and large sunglasses that obscure her face.
Throughout the 8-minute runtime, we are shown increasingly disturbing imagery: a fleshy, bipedal dolphin that seems like a being in a dolphin suit, with a head bulging out of its soft body and two blue, forward-facing, human-like eyes, ejaculating over a bloody sock, and a hellish laundry dimension, with infinite walls of stacked clothing on a floor of deep red, wet blood. Plenty of things I didn’t want to see the first time, but I rewatched to see again.
The Bleacher plays with time throughout—chronology turns to liquid, sloshing around so we can see the end, beginning, and middle intertwined. We first see the chaos at the laundromat, then her entry, and finally the grisly events that precede her current state. The animation style presents lumpy, plasticky, low-poly characters and sets that seem to glitch with every move, emphasizing the mental break and panic building in The Bleacher as she attempts to wash away evidence of her actions. Everything about this film feels…sticky. In a bad way. It did what it set out to do, as far as I can tell—make you look and keep you looking.
The stilted, unsettling, yet catchy songs are the highlight of the film. A staticky Frugalwash jingle sets the scene, presenting a solution for one’s “big load”...of dirty clothes. While catchy, it barely holds a candle to “The Laundry Lady.” The number quickly sheds light on the main character: she wants to bleach everything—including herself—clean again. The dolphin shimmies along with her during the performance, sliding its fins over her body as it comes closer and provides backup vocals until its final haunting statement: “You can’t erase what you did.”
For those searching for a film off-putting enough to grimace at but provoking enough to not be able to look away, this may well be it. The Bleacher (2024) gives enough to chew on for the 15 minutes after you watch it but doesn’t quite linger.