These are the releases that hit movie screens this January 19:
By Salvador Llopart
When horror is not seen, but sensed, it is much more disturbing: it is pure terror. The area of interest talks about Auschwitz and “if Auschwitz exists, God cannot exist,” said Primo Levi. Jonathan Glazer's film begins with a black screen followed by a bucolic family scene next to the river, and from there the Holocaust will permeate us like fine rain, until it consumes us. Little by little. With an indefinite rumble, a scream muffled by a gunshot and, in the background, the black smoke from the oven chimney, which never stops.
Because the wall of Auschwitz, about three meters high, prevents us from seeing. That wall is attached to the home of Commander Rudolph Höss, founder, organizer and director of the extermination camp. A real, historical character. Höss and his family have a house that is like a black hole of pain. The area of interest: the monster cave. Höss was responsible, corroborated by himself in the Nuremberg trials, for more than three million deaths. Confronting the mass murder, the systematized murder, that is the Holocaust, is a challenge for any filmmaker. And a condemnation, too. Glazer faces evil with distance and coldness, like the film's photography itself. It is an everyday evil, nothing trivial. In a family indifferent to the suffering of others. Höss's wife, Hedwing (Sandra Hüller, the protagonist of Anatomy of a Fall), is the reference, oblivious to everything other than his well-being.
Glazer has loosely - very loosely - based himself on the novel of the same title by Martin Amis to shoot a Big Brother-style film, with a dozen cameras spread around the house. The protagonists move between subtle angles and low angles, in wide focus shots, in the distance. There is no plot. There are no melodramas either. There is no emotional salvation. That's why everything is more terrifying. The area of interest, in its insistence on showing indifference to the massacre, would even be sick - the gloating in evil - if the director had left it there and not made Höss vomit at one point. The murderer's vomit, perhaps because of his lost humanity, saves us all from vomiting our own pent-up nausea.
Por Philipp Engel
We are, on the cheap, facing the best horror film released in our theaters since Háblame, and it is much more rounded than the unbalanced, but enormously rewarding, film by the Philippou brothers. The great winner of the last Sitges festival is a road movie with a spaghetti western aroma supposedly set in some remote province of Argentina, which begins when Evil nestled in the body of a young man, transformed into a disgusting suppurating mass, begins to act as theirs in the region, influencing people and animals, and causing atrocious carnage. We will follow in the footsteps of Pedro (charismatic Ezequiel Rodríguez), a man who, faced with the need to save his dysfunctional family in a hopeless situation, will make desperate decisions, feeding the extreme anxiety of the respectable person, who will accompany him on an emotional journey that does not subside. in any moment.
The greatness of this devilish film lies in the fact that Rugna collects the tradition of the best horror films, from John Carpenter to an explicit tribute to Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960), passing through the now iconic poster scene that gives it the return to The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), while offering something completely fresh and innovative, inventing a mythology that, never better said, works like a shot. We could continue adding conscious and unconscious references, but the important thing is that Rugna, who already demonstrated his mastery in the previous Aterrados (of which he could direct an American remake), does not tremble when it comes to staying the course, without skimping the most unpleasant shots, of a risky and always surprising contemporary horror film with the makings of an instant classic. The prophetic character attributed to it on the Internet, after the arrival of a political force determined to dismantle Argentine cinema in its moment of greatest historical splendor, is nothing more than an added value.
By S. Llopart
Four friends of a certain age and their respective wives decide to go celebrate their fifties in the Mediterranean sun. But commercial aviation has reasons that vacations don't understand, and the change of plans takes them to foggy Brittany, to the noble mansion of one of them. In Brittany it rains, and that confines "the gang" to the mansion, where misgivings, doubts and suspicions emerge. Deep down everything is a game with the obvious intention of entertaining and making us forget. Objective achieved: soon forgotten.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
Adorned with specific documentary images of our recent history, this thriller covers the Spain of the real estate bubble crisis, corruption, mafia shenanigans, the insatiable thirst for money, etc. Cosmopolitan in spirit (the action alternates between Madrid, Brussels, Geneva and Marbella), plot and characters boast an overload of clichés, but its frenetic and nervous pace, in the Scorsesian way, makes the story attractive, which never bores.
By S. Llopart
Ingeborg Bachmann was a fundamental writer and poet in German literature in the middle of the last century. Von Trotta approaches a moment in her life, marked by her relationship with the Swiss writer Max Frisch. The actress Vicky Krieps, who plays the writer, is the best - by far - in this drama of mistimed flowers and the clacking of a typewriter. The Swiss refinement and Italian classicism, through which the protagonists pass, leads without fuss to where the title indicates: towards the desert.
By J. Batlle
This is the story of two ordinary beings (a dance teacher and a sign language translator for groups with hearing problems) who meet and immediately fall in love. But he confesses to being asexual, or sexually unappetizing, and this anomaly is the axis on which the entire film revolves. A complex topic explored with tact, with sensitivity, through a direct and realistic style. The course of history, however, becomes progressively slow, monotonous.
Por P. Engel
After The Boogeyman, the man with as many noses as there are days in the year. Although here the tradition is limited to symbolizing the lies of a Catalan people in a strange and unexpected cocktail of folklore and historical memory: Civil War, a clandestine homosexual love, betrayals, shootings, and as a cherry on top, a colored girl, daughter of one who went as a missionary, who tests the tolerance of the locals. Stern and formally flat, it culminates in a somewhat blushing patriotic ending.
