After investigating the most disturbing and uncomfortable stories with Diamond Flash, Magical girl or Who will sing to you, Carlos Vermut excels with his new work, a sober story about real monsters, those you can run into daily and You would never suspect that they hide secrets that make your hair stand on end. In Manticora, which is nominated for four Goya Awards (direction, screenplay, actor and revelation actress), he dives into the inner demons of Julián, a lonely young man tormented by a dark desire who works modeling abominable creatures for video games.
Everything is triggered when he saves his young neighbor from a fire, for which he ends up feeling a most dangerous attraction. The Madrid filmmaker thus proposes to accompany the viewer on a journey through the limits of perversion, demonstrating once again that he is one of the most singular voices in contemporary Spanish cinema.
The film had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and then went through Sitges before landing on the billboard this Friday. "It was very interesting to see what people thought, to talk to them afterwards. I think the film grows as long as viewers complete it and share it," Vermut explains in conversation with La Vanguardia. "Manticore has to do with the moral questioning of the character, and of ourselves," he says of a story that had been going around in his head for some time and was "about a boy who fell in love with a boy and then a girl appeared in his life who it was like a kind of salvation to be able to have something similar to what I wanted. From there other elements appear like the universe of video games and virtual reality that complete the film".
Manticore, whose title refers to a mythological creature that devours people with the head of a lion, horns, and a dragon's tail, can be disconcerting to the viewer, although the director's idea is not going that way. "My intention is always to make good films and to tell a story that I consider interesting, deep and beautiful. I think that it is not a challenge for the public either, but rather an honest story insofar as I thought it was worth spending two years on it."
The theme of pedophilia hovers over the film but "in a subtle way, allowing the viewer to build the protagonist's relationship with his desire, if it was always there or has suddenly arisen, how he lives it and develops it because many times the relationship of each One with his condition is very different and I didn't find it interesting to do a study on pedophilia but rather the pain that comes with it. Can you blame someone for having these desires when many times they are even victims? Since there is no interesting debate regarding this matter I wanted more to accompany the character with his pain", he argues.
Nacho Sánchez, actor of Seventeen and the Doctor Portuondo series, gets into the skin of Julián for which he prepared himself by working on very specific things. "We have talked a lot about the monstrosity, which is present all the time, and I think it is a character that is in our life, which could be me and the good thing about the film is that the structure of the script is what really builds that monstrosity. I think we have worked on a very human and real story about characters who need to communicate. The essence of any solution to any type of problem is to be able to talk about it, be it bad or perverse."
Zoe Stein, who plays Diana, a girl who takes care of her father after suffering a stroke and who develops a relationship with Julián that gradually grows stronger after they meet at a party, maintains that they did not want to judge their characters. "In the end they are human and everyone has their problems and their traumas." "Diana also has her darkest side. At first she looks young and fresh, a girl who comes to Madrid and everything seems easy. But little by little you discover that she has a complicated life. In Julián she finds the need to take care of him, like to his father, and somehow he uses it.
Vermut says that genre cinema is the one he likes the most, but his films are full of drama. "It is something that comes naturally to me, despite the fact that I am not a dramatic person. But it is true that my way of understanding fiction is often through tragedy. And I don't know why it comes out to me. I start writing and Screwed up things come out of me. I'm interested in showing the darkest parts that aren't born as a matter of fetishizing darkness and perversion. I think that even though it's tragic and dark, Manticore is my most human film, that perversion is humanized because we're all human. The problem is thinking that the bad guys, the murderers and the thieves are not like us, but they are," emphasizes the director, who clarifies that his film does not seek the public's approval of pedophiles.
