Entertainment

‘Consuming Spirits’ review

For his animated film about a depressed small town and its rusted-out denizens, Chris Sullivan uses an array of styles: stop-motion miniatures for the streets and vehicles, flowing pencil animation for the flashbacks, puppet-like cutouts for the people and a few ill-fated deer. From these materials, Sullivan constructs a strangely believable world.

The intricate plot spirals around three main characters, each more maladjusted than the last. There’s Gentian Violet, sunk into middle-aged spinsterhood as she cares for a senile mother prone to shudderingly obscene remarks. Gentian’s boyfriend is Victor Blue, a paste-up artist at the local newspaper, an alcoholic who is genuinely puzzled when his editor objects to illustrating a garden story with a crime-scene photo of a corpse. And there’s Earl Gray, who runs a radio show where locals call in for gardening advice and get free-form answers of surpassing morbidity.

Not everyone will be in tune with the movie’s sick sense of humor, although it’s sometimes hilarious. And it’s a long film, too long in some respects. The characters are dazzling in their ugliness, and at about the 90-minute mark, the mottled skin, rotting teeth and red, rheumy eyes have you praying for something else to look at. Then Sullivan pulls the narrative noose tight at long last, and wraps up “Consuming Spirits’’ as neatly as a Victorian novel — albeit one written by someone with an alarming affinity for the grotesque.