A man-like creature — one that resembles a sentient peanut with a pair of stick legs and a severe overbite — is watching his partner wash their newborn baby when he’s suddenly distracted by the little basin being used as a bath. That little semi-circle activates something within him. A repressed and wounding memory from his childhood erupts into an idea that will rewire his species’ relationship to time itself, and our humanoid peanut friend begins to obsessively toil away at his new invention at the expense of being present with his family.

What that invention actually does is somewhat difficult to say; my best guess is that it allows people to Zoom with a younger version of themselves. But the sad fact of its origin story — which spans the first chapter of Don Hertzfeldt’s seemingly infinite 21-minute new short — is as obvious as the one stray hair on the Mr. Peanut’s head: Confronted with the most literal manifestation of his own mortality (his infant son), our hero retreats into the deepest reaches of his own mind rather than embraces the idea that he’s no longer only living for himself.

The award-winning device he retrieves from the darkest hollows of his shell has a recognizably seismic impact in that it invites people to see both everything and nothing that exists beyond themselves; to explode the finite boundaries of their physical existence at the same time as it shrinks their entire universe down to the size of the metal domes they wear on their heads. The echo chamber of its s’ own experience becomes a cocoon that protects them from the same cruel and unyielding world that Mr. Peanut’s technology hastens toward oblivion. With “ME,” which recalibrates the mordant despair of his previous work into a wordless musical that feels appropriately new and familiar at the same time, Hertzfeldt suggests that narcissism has become our shared defense against a pain that none of us can ever hope to escape by ourselves. That’s how I see it, at least.

~this review continues on IndieWire~