Ruben Brandt, a famous psychotherapist, is forced to steal priceless paintings from the world’s most revered museums and private collections in an attempt to appease the influential hallucinations that have plagued him since childhood - fallout resulting from subliminal messaging experiments executed by his father’s colleagues.
Accompanied by four patients with underworld ties, he and his band of thieves successfully strike esteemed institutions—the Louvre, the Tate, the Uffizi, the Hermitage, the Museum of Modern Art.
"The Collector" quickly becomes the most wanted criminal in the world. Gangsters and headhunters track him around the world while the reward for his capture continues to rise. A syndicate of insurance companies entrusts Mike Kowalski, a private detective and leading expert on art theft, to solve the "Collector Case."
“If ARABESQUE/CHARADE-era Stanley Donen had dropped acid at a history of modern art exhibition after viewing a James Bond film, the prompted reverie might resemble Eastern European animator Milorad Krstic’s voluptuously trippy, wildly original art-theft romp RUBEN BRANDT, COLLECTOR. An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list.” —Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“The movie’s an ‘audio-visual symphony’ crammed with hundreds of art and movie references, often morphing together in Ruben’s waking life and dreamworld. It’s also a doppelganger paradise, filled with double faces, and the bespectacled protagonist’s love of dual ties… Krstic has fun dabbling in weirdly caricatured gangster tropes and wild chases to satisfy the demands of the crime thriller.” —Bill Desowitz, IndieWire
“...Immersed in art, psychoanalysis and cinema, with every frame of this immaculately drawn visual feast replete with references from Caravaggio to Picasso, Eisenstein to Hitchcock, and Elvis to Rambo…This is one of the best animations to come out of Europe since BELLEVILLE RENDEZ-VOUS [THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE].” —Kaleem Aftab, Cineuropa
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