Diego Marcon’s Fritz (2024) explores the relationship between sound and image. The short, unsettling video shows a digitally animated boy hanging from a noose while yodelling. His lead vocal is accompanied by a choir that harmonises with his sad melody. The scene is looped with no end or beginning, which suspends the character in a tension between being and not being. Depicted in a stone barn, with a view onto an autumnal vista beyond the open door, the dawn landscape is suggestive of a new day and new beginning, lending a heavy pathos to his act of seeming self-harm. Beneath the yodelling we hear the knotted fabric tensing and stretching under the weight of his body. Occasionally, an exaggerated, cartoon-like shudder jump scares the viewer with kicking legs, physical resistance, and guttural sounds. The video communicates a deep sadness, isolation, and longing, and yet the intentions of the boy are more complex than first appears. At some moments, when the drama of death and suffering is not acute enough, the boy, seemingly without effort, kicks against the wall to activate a more dramatic swing of his body. The occasional glance to camera with a knowing, almost seductive look in his eye suggests this is a performance designed to manipulate a response in the viewer. The animation style is reminiscent of contemporary Disney but with the macabre theatricality of Tim Burton. These are aesthetic cues familiar to consumers of contemporary visual media and entertainment, that further emphasise the dissonance between form and content, image, and sound. It is almost cute and comedic in its delivery and yet tragic and horrific in subject. This tension is a hallmark of Diego Marcon’s works, where the style and referencing entrenched in the media itself plays just as significant a part in how meaning is inferred as the narrative itself. We see the familiar, commonplace techniques of cinema, used to depict the unfamiliar, uncanny, and horrific. Denied a coherent sense of linear time, conclusion, or resolution, the viewer is placed in a liminal zone, confused as to whether they are watching a boy’s purgatory unfold or witness to a desperate plea for attention. A shared, almost communal sense of grief is activated when watching the torment, regardless of which is true. We collectively recognise the cinematic tropes, which bind us together in our understanding. Yet, the more uncomfortable truth is that we also collectively empathise with the struggle and anguish we see before us. A grim depiction of our own experience; one of masking and glossing over elements of our deepest human attributes.