Arthouse-Action Film Genre

Directed by: “The People’s Cinema Machine”

Runtime: 98 minutes (including credits)

Language: Mandarin, with occasional German shouting

Budget: ¥11,000

There are films that wear their influences on their sleeve. Then there are films like Velocity of Fragility, which steals the entire sleeve, stitches it to a knock-off leather jacket, and insists—somewhat poetically—that it invented sleeves in the first place.

Purportedly made by a loose filmmaking collective from Guizhou province calling themselves The People’s Cinema Machine, this low-budget Chinese tribute/rip-off/interpretation of Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity is a work of astonishing nerve, complete incoherence, and unexpected sincerity.

The Plot, such as it is

The protagonist, known only as “Man” (played with affecting disinterest by former karaoke technician Gao Feng), wakes up in a forest made of curtains. There is a photo of a horse nailed to his bedroom door. His mission—though we are never told why it is his mission—is to deliver an encrypted USB drive to someone known only as “The Neigh.”

Along the way, he fights off helmeted monks, questions a tree about the nature of betrayal, and engages in a gunfight choreographed like Romeo and Juliet- the ballet. The narrative folds in on itself like badly steamed dumplings. Characters vanish mid-sentence. A love interest appears in the second act only to transform into- but I can say no more without ruining the film for you.

Familiar… Too Familiar

Let’s be clear: this is Fragile Velocity filtered through a dusty projector, with half the subtitles missing and the other half clearly translated via three layers of AI. But there’s a charm in the script. The long tracking shots are present, though here achieved by putting the cinematographer on a push scooter. The voiceover murmurs philosophical nothings (“The hoof remembers what the heart forgets”) and there’s an extended slow-motion scene of a man being slapped by a pigeon.

All the classic Arthouse-Action ingredients are here: whispered soliloquies, rain that falls only in one corner of the frame, and violence, so much violence. Yet it’s somehow even more opaque than the original, mostly due to budget constraints and a deliberate refusal to explain anything.

Highlights

• The soundtrack: A haunting blend of pan flute and dial-up modem noises.

• The villain: A ventriloquist dummy with LED eyes named “Velocity.”

Low Points

Much of the dialogue is inaudible, save for the occasional shout of “Sorry, I didn’t mean to shoot you!”—an apparent cue to deploy the film’s one working special effect. Fight scenes are mostly people falling over in rice fields.

Final Verdict

An absurd, earnest knock-off made with ambition, smoke, and borrowed trench coats. Often incomprehensible, frequently derivative, and yet… oddly touching.

Sir,

I write with growing dismay regarding your recent critical enthusiasm for the so-called new film genre, Arthouse-Action. If this term is unfamiliar, allow me to clarify: it is an unholy marriage of cinema’s two most incompatible instincts—the contemplative sigh of the arthouse film and the explosive grunt of the action thriller.

The result is exactly what one might expect from such a union: aesthetic confusion, emotional incoherence, and a deeply irritating two hours spent watching people whisper about love and childhood trauma in the middle of a car chase.

The Longueurs—those slow, meditative stretches that once defined the arthouse tradition—are now routinely interrupted by inexplicable gunfire. Just as one begins to engage with the silent despair of a man peeling an orange in real time, someone drives a motorcycle through a stained glass window. This does not deepen the narrative. It merely distracts.

Conversely, the action—when it arrives—is rendered impotent by indulgent soliloquies. One cannot enjoy a simple rooftop shootout anymore without the assassin pausing to quote Rilke at length, or discuss the philosophical implications of his job. I saw one poor actor hesitate mid-punch to recall a scent he remembered from 1983. The target escaped. So did my patience.

If one seeks gunplay and spectacle, let us have it. If one desires long tracking shots of a man walking slowly through fog, fair enough. But let us not combine the two.

In short, Arthouse-Action pleases no one. It is too loud for the brooding aesthete and far too moody for the thrill-seeker. Each side is ruined by the other. It is like trying to eat a full cooked breakfast while base jumping—possible, perhaps, but unpleasant for all involved and likely to end in trouble.

Yours in bewilderment,

Gerald B. Pinn

Wembley-on-Sea

Reviewed by: Ludovica Anxley, Cinema Correspondent-at-Large

Dir: Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs

Runtime: 143 minutes

Language: Bulgarian (mostly whispered)

Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity announces itself like a bailiff and proceeds to unfold precisely as one might expect: slowly, beautifully, inexplicably, and, given it is of the new art house-action genre, with a fair amount of gunfire in a monastery.

Set in an unnamed Eastern European city, the film follows Ivan (played with blank intensity by Lithuanian glassworker-turned-actor Linas Drukis), a retired ballet dancer turned sniper. Ivan is dragged back into the violent world he once pirouetted out of when a mysterious courier delivers a cassette tape. He then spends much of the film searching for a cassette player.

The plot—such as it exists—is less about narrative than mood. Jasper-Fuchs structures the film around a series of increasingly elliptical action sequences. A brutal ambush in a crumbling opera house is staged entirely in silhouette. A motorway chase unfolds in reverse. At one point, a gunfight is interrupted by a 7-minute “Dance of the Assasins”, representing, according to the director, “the futility of death.”

That said, Fragile Velocity is not for everyone. Those seeking coherence, emotion, or audible dialogue may feel punished. The pacing is glacial, once halting altogether to contemplate the emotional life of a bullet. Action purists will be bewildered by scenes in which the protagonist pauses mid-swordfight to reflect on the epistemological failings of Google Translate. Arthouse aficionados, meanwhile, will likely choke on the inclusion of not one but three exploding helicopters.

And yet… there’s something magnetic in the madness. It’s as if Tarkovsky were reincarnated as a stunt coordinator and was told to make a film, in Esperanto, using only a fog machine, two pigeons, and a copy of Call of Duty.

The sound design, by legendary foley artist Delphine Quibbe, is worth the price of admission alone. Every footstep echoes with the memory memories of the end of holidays. Several gunshots sound like a cello being murdered. The twist, to my mind, arrives late and makes no sense, but the box office disagrees – this film had a huge opening weekend and will probably encourage imitators.

Audacious, preposterous, occasionally transcendent. Like watching a Chuck Norris movie underwater while someone reads Rimbaud into your left ear

In a candlelit café somewhere near Kreuzberg, I meet Fernanda Lübeck—the elusive Brazilian-Swiss director whose work in the emerging Arthouse-Action genre of films has quietly detonated expectations of what a fight scene can mean. Dressed in a red jumpsuit, Lübeck greets me with a normal right-hand handshake, then a second, silent handshake with her left hand to symbolize the “one we didn’t have as children”. Straightaway it’s all very Lübeckian.

She burst onto the scene with 2024’s The Noose That Reloads, a hallucinatory neo-Western set in a post-emotion society where gunshots trigger flashbacks rather than wounds. Her work is dense, lyrical, often absurd—and surprisingly violent. Yet the violence always feels personal, even poetic. Her upcoming film, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, has already sparked interest from both the Oban Film Festival and an underground mime syndicate in Belgium.

MARIUS DELACOURT:

Fernanda, thank you for agreeing to this conversation. You’re notoriously reclusive. Some say you don’t exist at all!

FERNANDA LÜBECK:

Hello. I think I do.

DELACOURT:

You’ve been called the “Chekhov of gunfights.” How do you respond to that?

LÜBECK:

Guns are just monologues we haven’t translated yet. Every time someone fires a pistol in my films, they are expressing something repressed—love, loss, the memory of a grandmother, a hurriedly eaten sandwich, etc.

DELACOURT:

Your breakthrough film, The Noose That Reloads, features a 19-minute duel where both characters are asleep. What was your intention with that sequence?

LÜBECK:

Sleep is the only honest choreography. When people are awake, they pose. When they’re asleep, they reveal. I choreographed the duel based on the dreams I had when I was in my twenties. The bullets represent intrusive thoughts.

DELACOURT:

You once said, “The most powerful action scenes are the ones that resist action.” Can you elaborate?

LÜBECK:

Of course. In Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, there is a moment when the protagonist raises his weapon and… doesn’t fire. For 12 minutes. He just holds it, trembling. Each apostrophe represents a hesitation, a fracture in the sentence of violence. Audiences weep, occasionally from confusion, but usually from recognition.

DELACOURT:

Your films often feature unconventional weapons: a flute filled with bees, a gun that only fires boiling chocolate, a sword made of drawing pins. What draws you to these choices?

LÜBECK:

Conventional weapons are boring. A Glock is too literal. But a cello bow? That has resonance. Literal and metaphorical. I once saw a man silently stab another with a spoon and thought, Finally, someone understands dialogue.

DELACOURT:

How do you work with actors? Many of them say they don’t receive complete scripts, only “Indications of a character”.

LÜBECK:

Correct. I give them only two things: a daily diary entry by their character and a scented envelope that smells like the emotion they should portray that day. For Noose, I made the cast live in an abandoned theme park with no mirrors. They had to learn to act without knowing what they looked like. I think that comes across in the film.

DELACOURT:

Your next film, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, is said to involve time travel, ecclesiastical typography, and a single uninterrupted explosion that lasts 47 minutes. What should we expect?

LÜBECK:

Expect nothing. It is a film about punctuation and penitence. It begins with a priest forgetting the word for “bullet,” and ends with a sentient typewriter choosing not to kill the Pope. The action scenes are composed entirely of implied motion. It’s the best Arthouse-Action script I’ve seen, I hope I’ve done it justice.

DELACOURT:

Do you think Arthouse-Action is here to stay?

LÜBECK:

Genres are mis-traced steps, ultimately leading nowhere. Arthouse-Action will persist as long as someone is willing to whisper during a car chase, or cry about their childhood while defusing a bomb.

DELACOURT:

Finally, is it true that you filmed your last movie entirely in reverse, and then burned the original memory cards?

LÜBECK:

Yes. Memory is the only reliable editor. If the audience remembers the film, it was good. If they misremember it, it was perfect.

DELACOURT:

Fernanda, thank you, this has been enlightening.

LÜBECK:

Don’t thank me, go and see my films at the cinema then buy them on dvd and Blu-ray, then pay to download them to each of your devices individually.

Fernanda Lübeck’s Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun premieres this fall at the Itrecht Film Festival and in several abandoned train stations around the world simultaneously.

There was a time—not long ago—when the action genre was straightforward: guns, explosions, a grizzled man growling about injustice. Then, quietly at first, things began to change. Gunfights got slower. Dialogue got sparser. Entire city blocks would explode in the background while the camera lingered on a moth trapped in a teacup. And from this absurd, majestic collision of pretension and pyrotechnics, a new genre emerged: Arthouse-Action.

At its heart, Arthouse-Action is the cinematic equivalent of watching a monk duel with an embittered cop in a field of wheat for reasons that are never fully explained—and loving every minute of it.

Origins of Arthouse-Action

Scholars trace the birth of Arthouse-Action to a 2019 screening of Fast & Furious 46 that was accidentally projected over a silent screening of Gune Spobor’s A Brief Sadness in Springtime. Audiences wept, confused and exhilarated, as Vin Diesel drove a flaming muscle car across a Hungarian plain in real time. Within weeks, aspiring filmmakers had taken to their iPhones, filming kung fu fights inside abandoned libraries to the sound of Gregorian chant.

But it was 2022’s Spleen Protocol by Luxembourgian-Cuban director Émile Cantrille that formally announced the arrival of the Arthouse-Action genre. The plot? A mute assassin must defeat a sentient bureaucracy to retrieve his stolen identity documents, all while experiencing the four stages of grief in reverse order. The climactic gun battle in an empty IKEA showroom, scored to a 12-minute organ fugue, is now the stuff of legend.

Defining Features: Violence as Vocabulary

Arthouse-Action films reject the simplicity of traditional storytelling. Some of the tropes of the genre include:

• The Melancholy Gun: Weapons are often symbolic. A rifle might represent rural guilt. A grenade might be filled with rose petals. In The Noose That Reloads (2024, dir. Fernanda Lübeck), the protagonist only feels able to fire his weapon when reciting Portuguese poetry.

• The Long, Unblinking Take: The longer the better. Knife Weather (2023, dir. Theo Jankowski) features a 43-minute knife fight in a parking garage, filmed entirely in a single dolly shot. Neither character speaks. One cries gently. The other occasionally vomits.

• Unclear Motivation: Why are we chasing this briefcase? Why are we hanging upside down from a helicopter made of stained glass? We may never know. And that’s the point.

• Dialogue That Might Be Metaphor

For example, this exchange from Murder whilst watching Fellini:

“Did you kill him?”

“Only the part of him that believed in architecture.”

• Absurd Settings: Action scenes often occur in incongruous or meaningless locations: post-apocalyptic puppet theaters, underwater bus depots, art installations that are also landmines.

The Directors: Mad Geniuses or Elaborate Hoaxes?

Émile Cantrille (Spleen Protocol, Bullets for Moths) – A former entomologist who has never knowingly spoken English and claims to direct all his films in a trance state induced by barley tea.

Fernanda Lübeck (The Noose That Reloads, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun) – Known for insisting her actors live together in silence for 40 days before shooting.

Jian-Baptiste Sorgue (Static Fire, Fluid Priest) – Described by Cahiers du Cinéma as “the heir to Tarkovsky, if Tarkovsky were into Muay Thai and recursive dream logic.”

Claire Unit (Exit Wounds for Beginners) – Once edited a 2-hour shootout using only footage of the actors blinking. The violence is implied.

Rodney Thistle III (Krakatoa: The Musical) – A failed aristocrat turned filmmaker who insists all fight choreography must be based on 19th-century fencing manuals and mime.

Canonical Films

• Spleen Protocol (2022, dir. Émile Cantrille)

A mute bureaucrat battles an invisible tax agency. The final fight takes place inside a malfunctioning photocopier.

• The Noose That Reloads (2024, dir. Fernanda Lübeck)

Set in a future where all emotions are illegal, a disgraced wedding planner becomes a mercenary, powered by her grief.

• Knife Weather (2023, dir. Theo Jankowski)

Two men fight in a garage while a voiceover debates the morality of imported oranges.

• Exit Wounds for Beginners (2025, dir. Claire Unit)

A sniper contemplates his absentee father while eliminating targets across five continents, none of whom appear on screen.

• Glass Lung (2025, dir. Rodney Thistle III)

An ex-monk-turned-hitman falls in love with a foghorn. Contains no human dialogue and three operatic gunfights performed entirely in semaphore.

The Future: Bigger, Slower, Stranger

Coming soon:

• Chairblood (2026, dir. Dawa Hung) – A surreal thriller in which an office chair gains sentience and exacts revenge on corrupt corporate executives. Violence levels are said to be off the scale.

• The Night is a Gun in a Tuxedo (2026, dir. Alain Pfitzner) – A tuxedo-clad, anthropomorphic Pygmy goat solves crimes by trotting slowly through cities that no longer exist. Full of stunts. Unfortunately several goats were harmed making this film.

• Scarf Protocol (TBA, dir. anonymous) – A rumored 7-hour film in which a single scarf is passed between enemies during a global ceasefire. No script, no cast, no cameras—only shots of the scarf.

Final Thoughts

Arthouse-Action teeters on the edge of absurdity, impossibility and sincerity. It is a genre that dares to ask: What if a car chase could make you cry? What if an explosion could reveal the futility of language? What if the villain is actually your subconscious fear of intimacy, disguised as a man wearing two eyepatches?

It may not always make sense—but then again, neither does life. And in the end, what is cinema, if not a slow-motion dive through the flaming window of the soul?

“You don’t shoot a man because he wronged you,” as the protagonist of Knife Weather says. “You shoot him because the silence won’t end itself.”

That my friends is the crux of Arthouse-Action, one of the fastest growing genres of film in the Western world.