Four puppet soldiers walk and make a movement inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Quad (1981). By visually adapting Deleuze’s analysis of Quad (The Exhausted, 1995), the film explores the idea of "The exhaustion of possibilities” through stop-motion animation. The puppets and the printed images slowly disintegrate, and the residue envisions new possibilities.

Four soldiers walk on a rectangular stage. The soldiers with restricted movements gradually break away from the stage, while media devices and optical expressions that add variations to the pattern of their footsteps begin to trespass into the frame. Throughout the short running time, The Exhausted serves self-reflecting questions of the media that lie dormant in the film. This ambitious film explores the gap between the rectangular space within the frame and the square composition of the camera. It also reveals the subtle tension caused by the movement of stop-motion images, off-screen voices, and the early cinematic traces that capture the moving object. [KIM Byeonggyu]