Pachyderme is a 2022 animated short film (11 minutes) from France directed by Stéphanie Clément.
A nine-year-old girl is dropped off by her parents at the home of her grandparents for a ten-day visit. Nothing appears wrong at first; she sits on a swing in the yard and goes bicycling. Everything, however, is framed to be very unsettling. The little girl says that she is scared of the knots of wood in the ceiling that look like eyes, or the creaking of the old wooden floorboards at night. Eventually it becomes clear that there's something far worse in Grandma and Grandpa's house for her to be scared of.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Abusive grandparents. The little girl's grandfather is sexually abusing her.
- One scene suggests he's done it before. Grandpa has already suggested that his granddaughter go swimming in nothing but her panties, which is already bad enough. But when the girl goes under the water, she sees several other girls, all clad only in panties.
- Call-Back: The elephant tusk is shown broken, obviously by the little girl, after her grandfather dies. Later the girl in her narration notes with disgust that her grandmother glued it back together. At the end, after Grandma has died as well, the girl, now a young woman, has broken the tusk again and thrown the pieces in the lake.
- Creepy Cleanliness: The little girl notes how spotlessly clean and perfectly organized the house is, down to all the wooden logs for the fire being grouped by size and all the books on the shelves being in alphabetical order. This is another early sign that something is wrong in grandma and grandpa's house.
- Distant Finale: The last scene shows the girl some years later, having grown quite a bit and either a teenager or young woman, at the lake where her grandfather abused her. She still sees the nine-year-old wearing only her panties when she looks into the water.
- Face Framed in Shadow: How the grandfather is shown at the lake, from a distance and with the shadow from his hat obscuring his face, as he watches the girl splashing about in the lake clad only in her underwear.
- The Faceless: Grandma's face is never seen. Grandfather's face is never seen either, until a dramatic Scary Flashlight Face reveal near the end when it's become clear that he is an abuser.
- It Kind of Looks Like a Face: The girl, in her bed, looks up at the knots of wood in the ceiling beans and imagines that they are eyes. Soon she is seeing faces in the wood staring at her. This is of course symbolic of her grandfather staring at her.
- Nameless Narrative: Some sources give the little girl's name as "Louise" but that name is never said in the film.
- One-Woman Wail: A single female voice vocalizing on the soundtrack gives everything an ominous feel, especially early in the film when nothing specifically alarming has happened.
- Scary Flashlight Face: Scary firelight face, played for drama and horror. Towards the end, as the grandfather is lighting a fire in the wood-burning stove, there is a sudden cut to an extreme close-up of his face, lit from below by the fire. This is even more effective because until then the grandfather has been The Faceless.
- Title Drop:
- Grandpa has what looks like an elephant tusk up on a shelf. The little girl says "it belonged to a wild animal, some kind of pachyderm."
- Again at the end, when the girl, as a young woman years later, has thrown the broken elephant tusk in the lake.I was finally able to drown the pachyderm, but the lake will never be deep enough.
