I Am Tom Moody

A beautifully styled exercise in self-doubt, I Am Tom Moody is a confident and assured portrayal of a distinct lack of confidence and assurance. Tom is a musician of sorts, one plagued by the usual concerns, but here they're given flesh - childhood flesh, as Tom's doubt is ably personified by a smaller Tom.

Or, rather, the smaller Tom suffers and the larger Tom suffers still - it's easy enough to get recursive about these things, more so when one Tom pulls the other Tom out of his own ear. Hearing things - hearing things is important. "Get rid of it" is one thing worth hearing, the voice cast too - Mackenzie Crook is big Tom, Jude Crook (some relation) is little Tom, and Ainslie Henderson's film gives them both a, call it "Tom-ness". It's like finding photographs of your parents when they were children, like seeing a video of your own school play - the Jesuits said something about giving them the child and they'd give you the man, but here the Tom Moodys are parallel (if not parenthetic).

The character design is grand, those shifting eyes, a dinosaur jumper, a skull mask armour against the world. Peter Dere's music is well used too, but it's the staging that makes it. It's not quite a two-hander, perhaps a hand and a half? One's minded to talk about swords, and that's not just down to the presence of a dragon - even if it is Rilke's, and therefore metaphorical. There's real craftsmanship here, the stop-motion cast are genuinely amazing, and there's something in the way that the marionettes' movement is hesitant, more so than the stutter of shutter-speed, that's genuinely affecting. The wobbly credits are a bit much, but they're an off-note at the end of an excellent piece - Tom Moody is worth knowing, even if he doesn't yet realise it.