Fear, Fiends, and Family

In Wes Craven’s Scream (1996)—a simultaneous satire of and salute to the then-fledgling horror genre—a character prided himself of knowing all the unwritten rules of horror films. One of those principles should definitely be ‘Scare the audience precisely when they are feeling safe’. And if there is one place where every individual feels secure, it has to be his/her home. After all, there is even an idiom in English: ‘as safe as houses’.

The ‘home invasion’ sub-genre of horror films subverts this saying. While most haunted house films’ basic premise lies in the living violating the estate of the dead; in ‘home invasion’ films, the act of trespassing invariably occurs on the property of the living, and that, too, by the living. Also, more often than not, such films bring to the fore the latent beast within us all. It is as if to imply that a sense of territoriality is not a characteristic merely of animals, but of man, as well.

Each one of us, to some degree or the other, harbours a fear of burglars. There is even a scientific term for it: scelerophobia. But in ‘home invasion’ films, it is not a family’s jewels, which are at stake. In fact, the stakes are way higher. In Miguel Ángel Vivas’ second feature Secuestrados (2010) a.k.a Kidnapped; it is an entire family of three that is at peril.

Though we never really get to learn what he does for a living or his surname, it is quite obvious that Jaime (Fernando Cayo, who starred in Juan Antonio Bayona’s superb El Orfanato [2007], and will be seen very soon in Pedro Almodovar’s latest offering The Skin I Live In) is doing very well for himself. Along with his wife Marta (Ana Wagener) and teenage daughter Isa (Manuela Vellés), he has just shifted into an impressive house, replete with their own swimming pool, located within a gated community.

To celebrate the first dinner together as a family at their new residence, Marta has arranged for a bottle of champagne. But Isa has other ideas. Like most other eighteen-year olds, rather than spending time with her parents, she would prefer, instead, to go to a party with her boyfriend César. Moreover, as Jaime realises, Isa is having trouble adjusting to her new surroundings, which she labels as a ‘graveyard’—a term that, unknown to her, portends to what is about to follow.

During the first quarter of an hour of this 85-minute film, we observe an almost incessant argument between Marta and Isa. Marta is, we get to learn, quite fond of César. But just for that particular day, she would rather have her daughter stay with her than go out with her fiancé. When her initial cajoling and coaxing fail to have any effect on the adamant Isa, Marta sternly puts her foot down; even insisting that Jaime would side with her in this argument. However, to her utter chagrin, Jaime approves of Isa’s idea, and therein begins another squabble—this time between husband and wife.

In other words, we witness a mother trying to gather her family together for one ‘special’ dinner, and failing miserably to get across to her rebellious daughter. Her husband, on the other hand, is a lot more concerned with whether a gum boil is making its reappearance inside his mouth than playing peacemaker. Little did Jaime know that very soon he will have a lot more to be concerned about. Nor was Marta aware that her wish of Isa forsaking the party for the sake of her family will come true, but in a manner she could never have imagined.

As the couple find themselves drained out at the end of a really long day, and try to figure out apparently mundane but important issues like how to persuade the plumbers to ensure continuous supply of hot water in the bathroom or getting the Internet up and running soon, three Albanian men, with their faces hidden behind ski masks force their way into the house.

Now huddled on a sofa than at a dining table, the family members are forced to hand over all their debit cards and reveal the ATM PIN of each. When Jaime tries to outwit the leader of the burglars— when asked to reveal the whereabouts of his cell phone—we realise the masked intruders cannot be outsmarted easily. They put a plastic bag around Marta’s head and try to suffocate her as a warning to Jaime not to try such tricks again. If the opening sequence of the film was any indication, we know, but Jaime does not, that the trio are not amateurs—but pros in the act of breaking into houses and breaking the spirit of their residents.

‘I like to have things easy’ reveals the leader to Jaime. But, inevitably, things get complicated—both for the robbers and for the family. Complications arise when one of the three criminals, in a fit of rage, decides to disobey his boss’ orders. The goings-on get even murkier when a security guard arrives at the doorstep, acting on the neighbours’ complaints of hearing screams emerging from Jaime’s house. As the initial plan of the burglars begins to get completely messed up, Secuestrados builds up to a climax that is both depressing and disconcerting.

Forty-four years ago, Terence Young had a sinister and cold-blooded Alan Arkin and two other thugs terrorise a visually impaired Audrey Hepburn in her apartment in Wait until Dark, thereby sowing the seeds for a new tenet: ‘Home is where the hurt is’. Since then, this horror sub-genre has been visited by a number of famous directors (Sam Peckinpah: Straw Dogs [1971]; Michael Haneke: Funny Games [1997 and 2007]; and David Fincher: Panic Room [2002]). As they subvert one of mankind’s basic beliefs—that of the home being safe—these films are often unapologetically brutal. Cases in point are Angst (1983), a German film whose camerawork has had a profound impact on the notorious Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé; Hard Candy (2005), where Ellen Page went on a rampage; the Romanian film Ils (2006) and its Hollywood remake The Strangers (2008)—both of which had a brilliant twist in the tail; and the French film Á l’intérieur (2007) that pushed the envelope quite far when it comes to gore and violence.

 

There are shades of almost all these films in Secuestrados. The hooded intruders of Ils, the saving the honour aspect of Straw Dogs, the element of brutality towards an older woman of Angst, the mother-daughter relation of Panic Room, and the cowering bloodied image of a female from Á l’intérieur. Even an infamous scene from Noé’s Irreversible (2002) makes an appearance. While the ‘breaking the fourth wall’ element of Funny Games is missing, Vivas has tried to break new grounds in the subgenre by having only a dozen shots in the film, and by introducing interesting techniques like split screens to depict simultaneous action.

With Hollywood deciding to (yet again) unnecessarily remake Straw Dogs; it seems we no longer need to visit a haunted house to be scared. Because horror is making a lot of house calls these days.

Perception, Pretension, and Prevarication

 Filmmakers’ predilection towards exotic ailments has quite a long history. From Alfred Hitchcock (the eponymous Vertigo, 1958), Christopher Nolan (short-term memory loss in Memento, 2000) to our very own R Balki (progeria in Paa, 2009) various directors have portrayed mysterious maladies in movies with varying results. At first glance, Eugenio Mira’s second full-length feature, the Spanish film Agnosia (2010)—a similar bizarre medical condition in which an individual’s brain loses the ability to process visual, aural, and olfactory stimuli—seems to be a mere addition to this fascination of filmmakers. But curiously enough, drawing that conclusion would be a perceptual error on the part of the viewer. Because Agnosia treats the travail and trauma of a character suffering from the titular affliction merely as a plot point to drive the story forward. As a film it is a period piece, costume drama, triangular romance, and an espionage thriller rolled into one.

Even though the genre-mashing characteristic of Agnosia will become evident to the viewer when s/he is well into its 106-minute running time, the opening sequence makes it amply clear in an instant that what is about to unfold on screen is a sumptuous treat for the eyes. As the story comes to life, Unax Mendía’s (who was also the cinematographer for Mira’s debut feature The Birthday in 2004) camera opens on a valley enveloped within the Great Pyrenees mountains. The year, we are informed, is 1892. The setting, replete with a stage with curtains drawn, a ramp, and vacant chairs arranged in rows gives the impression of a performance about to commence—auguring an important element of the tale.

As the guests, all military officers, arrive in horse-drawn carriages, we find that they have been invited to witness the working of a new invention by an engineer, Artur Prats (Sergi Mateu), employed with the Holbien industries, which has been manufacturing ‘the best weapons’ for many years. The item on display is a catadioptric lens (a mirror lens known for its focusing capabilities) that can be used as a sniper scope. Helping Prats is his little daughter, Joana, who has been entrusted with the responsibility of releasing a bunch of black balloons, which the military officials shoot as targets while looking through the sniper scope.

A visibly distressed Joana becomes even more distraught at the cracks of the rifle, her anguish amplified by the neighing of a horse, which bolts at the sound of the gunshots. When one of the officials shifts his focus and shoots down the animal instead, Joana faints, hitting her head as she falls. As Prats’ assistant Carles Lardin (Eduardo Noriega, nicknamed the ‘Spanish Brad Pitt’, who has acted in films by Alejandro Amenábar, Brad Anderson, and Guillermo del Toro) comes to her rescue, to his utter dismay, he finds that Joana is having trouble distinguishing him from her father. This, coupled with the stage-drama like setting, are nothing but a foretelling of the tale that is about to unfold. If the bursting of the black balloons portended to the dark world Joana will be plunged into, the breaking of the glass of the sniper scope symbolised the shattering of Artur’s dream—both as a parent and a professional.

Seven years pass by. In the meantime, Artur has parted ways with his employer, Lucille Prevert (the prolific German actress Martina Gedeck, whose filmography includes The Good Shepherd and the Academy Award winner The Lives of Others—both in 2006; and The Baader Meinhof Complex in 2008) and has set up his own company, Joana Lenses, with Carles.

Artur treats Carles more as a son than a business partner, and has even promised Joana’s hand to him in marriage. When we first meet the adult Joana (Bárbara Goenaga), we hear her saying she is not comfortable wearing her mother’s clothes. It seems discomfiture has become a way of her life since that tragic incident at the valley. Fate has played a cruel game on Artur as well. A man who manufactures lenses for a living has been left behind with a daughter who cannot even perceive the faces of her close ones, even when they are at an arm’s length. The guilt-ridden Artur, disregarding the fact that his business is going through a rough patch, has employed a doctor, Meissner (Jack Taylor) to cure Joana, on whose methods Carles has very little faith.

The two ways in which we, humans, react to a disorder as strange as the one Joana is suffering from are expressed by two different sets of individuals in Joana’s household. While Carles, though outwardly devoted to Joana, is inwardly aloof; the servants, especially one individual named Mariano—begrudged by the fact that they have to wear different-coloured rosettes, because colour is one of the few stimuli Joana still reacts to—make fun of her.

But, Carles, Artur, and Joana are all unaware that a nefarious ploy is afoot, that will very soon engulf all three lives. It is a plan set in motion by Artur’s former employer, the ruthless Prevert, to extract the formula of the sniper scope—a secret, she believes, is in Joana’s possession. To attain her objective, Prevert plants a spy, Vicent (Félix Gómez), in the guise of a man servant in Artur’s residence. But when Vicent gets inadvertently fired from his job, he is sent back on his mission. Only this time, the plan is to exploit Joana’s malady in a manner reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980).

Three days are all that Vicent has at his disposal to coax the formula out of Joana—the period during which Joana will be completely isolated from all stimuli, while being cocooned inside a dark, sound-proofed room, as part of Dr Meissner’s last-ditch attempt to heal her.

But just like the darkest hour is always before dawn, a ray of light will invigorate Joana during those three days. She will, for the first time in a long time, feel as if those distant stars in the sky—the only thing in the world she could see in the same manner as any other individual—have landed inside that dark room, while being ignorant of the fact that she is, in reality, becoming a pawn in a game of deception.

Even though the perpetrators of this reprehensible charade take every precaution, they find themselves completely unprepared by the opposition they come face-to-face with. The adversary in this case is nothing but love—passion that arises from completely unexpected quarters and threatens to jeopardise their elaborate sham. 

In an interview, Mira had stated that the reason he chose nineteenth-century Spain as the setting for his film is because modern technology has nullified many of the problems that Joana faces in the film as a result of her ailment. But it is quite apparent that there are certain aspects of human nature that is not bound by any era, period or millennium. Each one of us harbours a secret; our love for another individual is not holistic and all-encompassing, but pigeon-holed to a specific aspect of him or her; and that in the end true love is all about sacrifice—putting the other’s happiness before that of our own. 

The Penalty, the Profession, and the Pain

In her book Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean, one of the foremost American proponents for the abolition of the death penalty, wrote: ‘Government ... can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.’ But in the 1960s, under the feared dictator Francisco Franco’s regime, capital punishment was very much in vogue in Spain, as we learn from the opening sequence of the acclaimed Spanish director and screenwriter Luis García Berlanga’s criminally underrated and unfairly under-viewed tragicomedy masterpiece El Verdugo (1963) a.k.a. The Executioner a.k.a. Not on Your Life.

As the film begins, a prison guard has his breakfast interrupted with the arrival of a mortician and his assistant, the latter carrying a coffin on his shoulders. Through a second door emerge a handful of government officials, including the counsel of defence, and an aged, affable man, carrying with him a case. He is, the mortician tells his assistant, the eponymous executioner. The duo and the coffin now enter through the same door, only to re-emerge a moment later. Only this time, they are holding the casket up at both ends, indicating there is a body inside. Thus, subtly, the spectre of death enters the frame, and will hover around the main characters throughout the film. However, like the morbid act of the execution itself, it will never really come out in the open.

The elderly, genteel executioner is Amadeo (played brilliantly by the renowned Spanish actor José Isbert). As the mortician’s assistant, José Luis (portrayed by the Italian actor Nino Manfredi) tells his boss, ‘…he looks like a normal person’, the first of the many wrong impressions that we harbour about an executioner gets snuffed out.  A veteran of forty years in the gruesome profession of garroting, Amadeo has a long time ago come to terms with the reality that ‘executioners are misunderstood people’. That is why, he does not take it as an affront when the prison guard looks distastefully at his case containing the tools of his trade that he had mistakenly placed on the same desk where the guard was having his breakfast. Nor is he shaken by the obvious irritation his innocuous query about when the first streetcar arrives is met with.

A chance visit to Amadeo’s residence reveals to José Luis that he is not really popular among his neighbours, either, who consider themselves ‘respectable people’. But when the young undertaker meets Amadeo’s spinster daughter Carmen (Emma Penella), something starts brewing between the two hearts, and it is not just the coffee that Carmen dutifully offers him.

As the two start coming closer, they find that they share something in common. Carmen confides to José Luis that all her fiancés have run away the moment they had learnt that she was an executioner’s daughter. José Luis tells her in return that every girl has left him when they had realised that he earns his bread by working as an undertaker. While death parts other couples, in this particular case, it brought two hearts together.

Coaxed by his boss, who is also Amadeo’ friend, and browbeaten by being unfortunately caught in bed with Carmen when Amadeo had barged into the house unannounced, the unassuming undertaker has no other option but to abandon his dream of going to Germany and become a mechanic, and get married to Carmen, instead. But surely, there is no place in his own house for his new bride, which is already bursting at its seams as a result of the presence of José Luis’s younger brother Antonio (curiously played by an actor named José Luis López Vázquez)—a tailor by profession—his shrewish wife, and their two children. Moreover, on the day of the wedding, disgusted that his brother had taken an executioner’s daughter as a bride, Antonio had proclaimed that he would be parting ways with his elder brother.

But good news arrives in the form of a missive that declares that in recognition of his four-decade-long service, Amadeo has been granted a three-bedroom flat. However, as fate would have it, the soon-to-be-retired executioner is told that he will lose the flat the moment he is out of work. Hence, the future of the family, which is on the verge of welcoming a new addition, seems to hang on whether an individual, who is an expert at interring, can now become equally proficient at garroting.

The very idea of earning his livelihood by taking someone’s life is unimaginable to José Luis. But his feeble protests stand no chance while facing the incessant haranguing of his father-in-law, who keeps insisting that he take the job and make the flat theirs simply because ‘…they sentence people, but, in the last moment, they're going to pardon them!’ Begrudgingly, the undertaker, who has always believed that ‘People should die in their own beds’ accedes to Amadeo’s request, while dreading the day when he will be called to ‘work’. To his utter dismay, his fear soon becomes reality, when he is summoned to Mallorca to execute a condemned convict.

A close scrutiny of all timeless comedies will reveal a common thread. If one scratches their funny, frothy façade, one will invariably find pain and pathos running deep. Berlanga’s El Verdugo is no exception.

The film is full of both wry, satiric humour as well as laugh-out-loud moments. Take for example, the scene when José Luis visits Amadeo’s house for the first time. On the wall, he spies a framed photograph. Noticing his gaze, a nonchalant Amadeo tells the young undertaker that it is one of his ‘clients’, and then goes on to show him the wristwatch that the man had gifted the executioner. A horrified José Luis now turns his attention to another wall, this time adorned with more than one portraits. Pre-empting the unasked query, the aged man replies, in an equally casual manner: ‘No, those are just my relatives!’ Or the scene when Carmen wants to buy a new shirt for José Luis., and Amadeo takes one look at his son-in-law’s neck to announce: ‘It’s a size forty-one!’

While peppering his film with such smile-inducing moments (the wedding scene is uproariously funny), maestro Berlanga and his frequent collaborator, co-writer Rafael Azcona, have not, for a moment, allowed the subliminal anti-capital punishment message of their film to get diluted. By condemning the duplicity of governments that proclaim they want to protect the lives of citizens, and at the same time sentence them to their deaths, Berlanga and Azcona state their message aloud through Amadeo, when he suddenly grasps the hand of his would-be son-in-law and brings it near a lamp socket to say: ‘ That is only 250 volts! They make me laugh when they say public garroting is inhuman. Is the guillotine better then? Do you think it’s fair to bury a man in pieces?....The Americans they use the electric chair, which leaves them carbonised, scorched’.

The director-screenwriter duo also delivers the same message subtly, in the unforgettable penultimate sequence of the film, by raising the all-important question: Who really dies and who gets killed at the garrote, gallows or guillotine?

Single-shot Scare Show

‘Cabin in the woods’ is a horror sub-genre that has been covered in debut feature films by directors like Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, 1981), who went on to helm the three Spiderman films; and Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, 2002), who gained notoriety with his ‘torture porn’ duology, Hostel (2005) and Hostel II (2007). The recent entry into this field comes from a country better known for its soccer than scary cinema—Uruguay.

Like his illustrious predecessors, first-time director Gustavo Hernández’s La Casa Muda (2010), or The Silent House, while playing within the rules of the sub-genre, still manages to carve a niche for itself. On one hand, while Hernández has succumbed to a time-tested marketing ploy, namely, the ‘Based on true events’ gambit—used to varying degrees of success by films ranging from The Amityville Horror (1979 and 2005) to The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)—on the other, he has displayed an innate confidence in himself by adopting a format that is as rare as ‘true story’-based horror films are a dime a dozen.

What we are referring to here is the single-take, single-shot film that takes place in real time—the first example of which dates back to 1948. In that year, Alfred Hitchcock introduced the long-take approach to filmmaking in Rope (interestingly, Rope was also based on a real-life event—the Leopold-Loeb case), with mixed results. Purists will point out that Rope was not really a film with a single continuous shot, and they are right to do so. Hindered by the technology of the time, which only allowed film rolls that could shoot for a maximum of ten minutes, Hitchcock masterfully masked the cuts and other edits simply by blocking the screen (having a character walk in front of the camera, for example). Developments in camera and storing devices have now made the single-shot film more of a possibility, as can be seen in Mike Figgis’ experimental Timecode (2000), Aleksandr Sokurov’s awe-inspiring Russian Ark (2002), and Spiros Stathoulopoulos’ gritty PVC-1 (2007).

While the technique adopted by Hernández is novel, the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the tale he tells (the screenplay was penned by Oscar Estévez based on a story by Hernández himself). The plot, based on an unsolved incident that occurred in a small village in Uruguay in the 1940s, unfolds with a young woman, Laura (Florencia Colucci) arriving at a dilapidated double-storied farmhouse with her father, Wilson (Gustavo Alonso). Néstor (Abel Tripaldi), the owner of the house, who is acquainted with both father and daughter, have entrusted them with the job of fixing it, so that ‘it looks nicer to prospective buyers’. The inquisitive Laura starts looking around the moment she arrives, only to find that all the windows of the house have been barricaded from the outside—to keep others out or to keep something in, one wonders.

As the father-daughter duo settle down on armchairs to pass the night, knowing that they will have to get up early in the morning if they are to finish refurbishing the house within the next two days, Laura’s curiosity is piqued when loud, heart-thumping noises are heard from the first floor. As her father goes up to investigate, Laura is left behind, armed only with a scythe and a lantern at her disposal (the electricity connection had long been cut off). And so she shall be, alone and afraid for almost the entire runtime of the film.

A temptation for the filmmaker must have been to go the ‘point-of-view’ way, as seen in other horror flicks like The Blair Witch Project (1999), REC (2007), Paranormal Activity (2007) and Paranormal Activity 2 (2010). But, Pedro Luque, the cinematographer of La Casa Muda, instead of allowing the camera to become Laura’s perpetual eyes, gradually shifts perspective, and makes it an accompaniment, instead, as she delves deeper and deeper into the bowels of the house in her desperate bid to get out. Moreover, unlike most other films of the genre, here, the protagonist behaves in a rational manner once she finds herself in mortal peril. She keeps looking for the house keys, tries the phone, and even barricades a door. That is why, when she breaks down and keeps sobbing and whimpering, we empathise with her predicament. 

Hernández succeeds in gradually upping the ante as far as the creepiness of the atmosphere is concerned by resorting to some well-established norms in horror that most of his renowned counterparts tend to shun. Majority of the film is without any dialogue or even monologue because the only character on screen is Laura. When sounds do occur, other than the loud thumps, like those made by the clinking of a can or an ominous child’s rattle, they add to the overall sense of claustrophobia and disorientation. Mention must also be made of the eerie score by Hernán González that is far more effective than cheap ‘jump scare’ and ‘boo’ tactics.

However, La Casa Muda is not without its flaws. Certain parts of it remind us of films as varied as the Thai spook fest Shutter (2004), the French-Romanian home invasion flick Ils (2006), and even Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Then, there is the obvious gripe as to why a self-professed ‘real time’ film should have an editor (Hernández himself) credited. The biggest issue has to be the film’s conclusion that raises more queries about what preceded it than provides an answer to. There is a post-credit sequence, as well, but it appears more as a tagged-on device to attain the duration requisite of a feature-length film than serving as any value addition.

Having said that, La Casa Muda is still a commendable effort, which should not be adjudged based on the fact that even though most of the film-going fraternity is still to watch the original, Hollywood has already bastardised it in the form of a remake that has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; but on the basis of the point that on a miniscule budget of $6,000 a greenhorn director had decided to try his hand at something that can be a daunting task for even the most accomplished of filmmakers. 

Loss, Longing, and Loneliness

 El Hierro, the smallest and south-westernmost of the seven Canary Islands of Spain, is also known as Isla del Meridiano, or the Meridian Island, because since time immemorial, its location has been serving as the pointer to cartographers to mark the Prime Meridian. In Gabe Ibáñez’s debut feature film, Hierro (2009), the island drives a wedge into the life of single mother María (portrayed by Elena Anaya, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Julia Ormond, and will next be seen in the acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s much-anticipated The Skin I Live In) much the same way the Prime Meridian slices the globe into two halves.

María and her five-year-old son Diego (Kaiet Rodríguez) board a night ferry to El Hierro. While Diego is busy playing, María drifts off to sleep and wakes up to a living nightmare. To her utter dismay, she finds no trace of her child. A thorough search is organised both on the ferry and into the inlands, but to no avail. It appears as if the island, which is known to assist us in pinpointing our own location is, for once, at a complete loss when it comes to locating this particular five-year old.

Six months pass by. Like the island itself, María finds herself more and more cut off from those around her—be it her work or her sister Laura (Bea Segura), who has recently given birth to a baby boy. Ironically, she also realises that ever since the incident on the ferry, she has developed a phobia towards water, even though her job involves dealing with various aquatic species. With every passing day, she feels more and more like those fishes in her workplace, swimming inside huge water tanks made of glass. Her grief makes it difficult for her to reach out to others, and starts manifesting itself in frightening drug-induced hallucinations. No matter how much she tries, María just cannot come to terms with her loss and seems equally unable to forgive herself for not living up to a promise she had made to Diego. Many a time she had assured him that in a game of hide-and-seek if she fails to find her son at first, she will keep on looking for him.

Then, one day, comes a phone call telling her that a body of a young boy has been found in the waters surrounding El Hierro. The age and the approximate date of death match those of Diego. There, at the morgue, once she sees the body, María is as relieved as the coroner is surprised. It appears that the officials were, for some odd reason, convinced that it was indeed Diego’s body, but María proved them wrong. To be absolutely certain, they request a DNA testing to be done. Since that would require the presence of a judge, and the judge is currently off the island, María is requested to stay behind for three more days—a request she begrudgingly acquiesces to.

With nothing to do to pass the time, María and Laura, who had accompanied her, hire a car to tour the island. On an isolated beach, while taking the first step towards overcoming her phobia of swimming, María thinks she spots Diego playing near a travel trailer. Hoping against hope, she begins investigating on her own. Soon, she finds out that her is not the only child to have gone missing in El Hierro. But what are her chances of getting to the root of this mystery when the people on the island are a closely-knit community and it is quite apparent that there are times when she cannot trust her own eyes?

A child gone missing is a common trope in thrillers. The various facets of this particular sub-genre have more or less all been covered in some memorable outings like Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Wicker Man (1973), Without a Trace (1983), The Orphanage (2007), and Changeling (2008); as well as in some not-so-memorable ones like The Forgotten (2004), Flightplan (2005),  and Vinyan (2008). Hierro falls somewhere in between these two extremes.

While the premise itself is as worn out as the traditional usage of El Hierro’s location, the film is not an abject failure for more than a couple of reasons. An animator by profession before he made a foray into feature filmmaking, where Ibáñez has stumbled as a storyteller, he has more or less made up the lost ground when it comes to the visual elements. Aided admirably by his cinematographer Alejandro Martínez, Ibáñez’s vision comes alive in a sumptuous treat for the eyes. Ibáñez also uses his experience in working with miniatures to bring about a sense of stark contrast. This is apparent from the very first sequence of the film itself, when a toy car tumbles down beside an upturned vehicle. This big-small comparison is threaded throughout the film. We see a tiny Diego seated in front of water tanks containing huge fishes; tiny insects that lie trapped in the water of a swimming pool; a single individual on a sprawling beach…the instance are many. It is as if to depict that the magnitude of any incident is relative to the point of view—a fact that comes to light when María overhears her sister over the telephone and realises that the mishap that changed her life in an instant like a chameleon changing its colours is not that significant to her own sibling.

Another refrain that runs through the film is the leit motif of water, as exemplified by fishes inside tanks and in the ocean; Diego being asked by his mother about ‘What lives in the sea’; water spilling out from an upturned glass and bursting out of a tap; water seeping from under a corpse; a painting of waves; María’s fear and eventual victory over fear of swimming; and so on. In a sense, water, too, acts as a contrasting element that brings out how desiccated and barren María’s life had become the moment she lost her only child.

Water just as well might have another implication here. In Spanish, ‘hierro’ means ‘iron’. As the film progresses, we find how armed with only an iron will, a dejected, depressed, and disconsolate mother embarks on a journey to uncover the truth in a terrain as desolate as her own existence. However, like the effect of water on iron, as time passes, she finds her willpower gradually losing the battle against forces that are way beyond her control.

Trains, Transit, and Tribulations

It is said that if one climbs on top of the tallest tree of the Tapachula municipality of the Mexican state of Chiapas, then one can see all the way to China. But the dream destination for most Central Americans, irrespective of whether they are from Mexico or from Honduras, is not the Asian behemoth, but El Norte (the north), which is what they call the country that encapsulates all of their aspiration—America.

These illegal immigrants chase the ‘American dream’ as much as they flee from a life marred by the Maras, or criminal gangs—the most vile, violent, and vindictive of which is the Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as MS or MS-13. Instantly recognisable by the ornate tattoos that make the Mareras, or gang members—who are sometimes as young as 12, such as El Smiley (Kristian Ferrer)—look more like the Maoris, the MS-13 is a widely networked and closely knit group. Led by the merciless Li’l Mago (Tenoch Huerta), or ‘little magician’, MS-13 professes to flourish on the three pillars of honesty, respect, and generosity, but treats any transgression with utmost cruelty, of which cortes or cuts inflicted on the body is just the beginning. Not surprising, considering its initiation ceremony involves a new recruit being kicked around mercilessly like a football for 13 excruciatingly long seconds—harking back to the numeric part of MS-13—and killing a chavala, which is a derogatory term for the members of any rival gang.

No wonder then, for a Mareo like Willy (Edgar Flores), who is known better among his homies, or brothers in the gang as El Caspar, a teardrop tattoo is a constant reminder of how futile everyday is, especially when one has a sweetheart. In the opening shot of the film, we see Willy looking at a path laden with fallen leaves, with sad eyes. This is because deep down he knows that if he tries to leave all this behind and realise his dream of visiting the Six Flags amusement park in Texas with his girlfriend, it will in all probability result in him being crushed like the leaves. Falling in love with the beautiful Martha Marlene (Diana Garcia) has just made his life a bit more complicated. To spend more time with his fiancée, he is avoiding the mandatory visits to La Bombilla, or the ‘light bulb’—a place in Tapachula along the train tracks. Symbolising the flicker of hope that burns inside every illegal immigrant, who wishes to land up in America, La Bombilla is where these hoping-against-hope bunches flock together, often sleeping on the tracks to be woken up by the alarm of a blaring freight train, which is their ticket to the land of their dreams. That Willy is playing truant has not escaped the attention of Li’l Mago. El Caspar’s predicament is that neither can he tell Martha Marlene how close he is to Li’l Mago, nor can he tell his lascivious leader about her existence.

Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a teenager from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, is also facing a predicament. Horacio (Gerardo Taracena), her estranged father, who she has not seen in years, has just re-entered her life and now plans to take Sayra and her uncle Orlando (Guillermo Villegas) to New Jersey. While the possibilities that such a proposition entails are not lost on her, the inherent fact that she will be putting up with her half sisters, who she unambiguously tells her father are ‘your family’, has taken the gloss out of it.

Just like our introduction to Willy, when we get our first glimpse of Sayra, she, too, is looking at the horizon, but from a high vantage point. This is nothing but a precursor to the fact that eventually, the lives of Sayra and Willy will be intertwined; as well as a portend to the journey Sayra, Horacio, and Orlando will undertake—atop freight trains that trudge along laboriously, taking innumerable immigrants within a touching distance of the US border.

Sin Nombre (2009) is the American director, writer, and cinematographer Cary Joji Fukunaga’s first foray into directing a feature-length film. Based on his own short Victoria para chino (2004), which dealt with the true story of 80 illegal immigrants from the Mexican border who travelled inside a refrigerated truck with tragic consequences, Sin Nombre narrates the harrowing experience faced by countless immigrants, who originate from deep into Central America, including places like Guatemala and Honduras. Perched precariously atop cargo trains, only a handful of these hordes of nameless, faceless humans ultimately succeed in crossing over. The rest either fall prey to murderous marauders during the perilous journey or are shot at by the border police or the judicial patrol.

With more than one-third of the film shot on top of a cargo train, Sin Nombre is a cinematographic marvel. However, it is apparent that what attracted renowned Mexican actors Gael García Bernal (Amores Perros, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mamá También) and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También) to come on board as executive producers of a film by a debutant director is not its rich visuals, of which there are plenty, but because it dares to give a face and a name to immigrants and gang-members, who go through their lives facing trials and tribulations that are eerily similar. 

The Circle of Coldness and Cruelty

The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had once said, ‘All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain’. In Tras el Cristal (1987) a.k.a In a Glass Cage, Spanish director Agustí Villaronga’s ‘art shocker’, Klaus (Günter Meisner) has an 0ld habit of keeping record of certain facts about himself that are so disturbing that he has managed to keep them a secret from his wife Griselda (Marisa Paredes) and his little daughter Rena (Gisèle Echevarría). Little does he know that soon these facts will come back to haunt him, in an excruciatingly horrifying manner, embodied in a beast, ironically named Angelo (David Sust).

Similar to Psycho (1960), Tras el Cristal tells the crux of the story that will eventually unfold in the pre-credit sequence itself. The film opens with close-up shots of an eye and a camera, followed by click of the shutter perfectly synched with the blink of the eye. At that very moment, we the viewer, become privy to the fact that the film is all about ‘looking’, ‘listening’, and ‘memories’.

As the scene unfolds, we see a man (whose name we shall learn later, is Klaus) clicking photographs of a young boy, who is naked and wounded, hanging from the ceiling with his hands tied up. It is around this time that another gaze enters the frame—a point-of-view of a third entity, hidden outside the building and peering through the window, looking at both Klaus and the obviously numb-in-pain youth.

If one goes back to Hitchcock’s most famous film, one will remember how there, too, in the opening sequence, an external gaze, in a swooping bird-like motion, enters a motel room where two individuals are involved in another type of activity, which, like Klaus, they, too, want to hide from the eyes of others. But in both instances, Hitchcock and Villaronga turn the audience into voyeurs by using point-of-view shots, and thereby make them accessory to the ensuing horrific events.

There is similarity between the two opening sequences in a sense of foreboding as well. While the bird-like swooping movement in Psycho alludes to Norman’s hobby of taxidermy as well as his predatory instinct, in Tras el Cristal, the ‘gaze’ pertains to knowledge. Unlike Klaus, we know that he is being watched, and unknown to Klaus, we see someone picking up a diary from the scene of the crime. And knowledge, as we shall see, will play a pivotal role in the remainder of this treatise on sadism, violence, and voyeurism.

A distraught and repentant Klaus, wishing to put an end to the evil inside him, tries to commit suicide. However, he fails, and instead of finding himself inside a coffin, lands up inside an ‘iron lung’—an artificial, metallic respiratory contraption, in which his paralysed body lies immobile, with only his head sticking out under a glass dome. While Klaus remains cocooned inside the breathing apparatus, Griselda and Rena, we learn, have remained imprisoned within the four walls of their mansion, ever since the family went into exile eight years ago. Into their lives walks in Angelo, a young man, who proclaims to having taken care of Klaus when he was in the hospital.

In sync with the first sequence of the film, where we could only hear his breathing and never come face-to-face, we ‘hear’ Angelo, long before we ‘see’ him. We find him threatening to reveal what Klaus did before he jumped off a roof, if he is not hired as his private nurse.

And when we do get the first glimpse of Angelo, we see him through the gap of a door not fully opened, telling us that there is a lot more to this young man than our eyes can discern at first glance.

For Klaus, the horror begins almost immediately. At night, when the two other members of the family are fast asleep, Angelo tiptoes into Klaus’ room and starts reading out from Klaus’ own diary, the despicable acts he had carried out on little boys when he was employed as a Nazi doctor. As if reliving those disgraceful days and heinous deeds were not enough, very soon Angelo reveals to Klaus” ‘I could be what you used to be’.

With paedophilia as an underlying theme, Tras el Cristal is not an easy film to watch to begin with. But by making innumerable references—both oblique and direct—to scopophilia (the act of deriving pleasure from looking), it makes the experience a first-hand one for the audience. Like Klaus, who is stuck in a contraption for the rest of his life, and has no other option but to look at his ‘mirror image’ in Angelo via an actual mirror that Angelo erects in front of his face; or similar to the young boys who Klaus used to strap down to a chair before abusing them, we the viewer find ourselves rooted to our seats, equally powerless and horrified by what is happening before us, but unable to look away.

In fact, to underline this very aspect, Villaronga, through the character of the maid of Klaus and Griselda’s household, tells us, though in a different context: ‘The machine makes me nervous. It’s like being in the cinema’. To add to the overall claustrophobic experience, Villaronga supplements his visuals, which are perpetually bathed in swathes of icy blue and depressing gray, with ingenious sound effects. The suggestive ‘beast within’ comes alive as much as in the screeching mechanical heaving of the ‘iron lung’, as it does via the sound effects depicting the rattler of a rattlesnake and the squeal of a wounded animal, during two pivotal scenes in the film, wherein the life of one individual lies at the mercy of another.

To the frequent film-watcher, the parallels to Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, a film that was released more than a decade after Tras el Cristal, are obvious. However, unlike its distant, watered-down cousin from Hollywood, this Spanish film has built up a certain reputation for itself—and quite rightly so. Rather than merely slapping an in-your-face message of ‘immorality never pays’, it actually manages to be disturbing because it turns the audience into an accomplice.

Just like Angelo used meshed wire to turn the hallway of Klaus’ house into a replica of those numerous concentration camps, Tras el Cristal creates the eponymous glass cage for the audience, as well. We are infantilised, immobile, and passive in our response, but very much active in our participation. Klaus is made to look through the crystal dome via a mirror. We just cannot tear our gaze away from the screen.