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. | Tesis
(1995) |
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The name of Alejandro Amenabar is already familiar to those who follow the horror genre – in a relatively short career he has already carved out a niche for himself with a succession of interesting and often frightening movies; Open Your Eyes (remade as the disastrously hideous Vanilla Sky), The Others and his debut film Tesis which first got people to take notice of the new kid on the block. Spain has always been fertile ground when it comes to horror and Amenabar is merely the latest torchbearer in a fairly distinguished line. Many reckon Italy to be the heart of Euro-horror and they may well be right but there can be little doubt that while Spain may not have matched Italy for volume, they have certainly matched them for quality all the way. Alejandro Amenabar is currently emerging as Europe’s foremost horror/thriller director – a reputation he seems to have earned rather than been given. Tesis begins with Angelica, a film student, on a subway that comes to a halt due to a messy suicide. Passengers are asked to leave the platform and not look at the horribly mangled body but Angelica is drawn to the gory sight along with a number of other passengers – somehow magnetized, inexorably drawn to the scene out of a morbid curiosity that seems to afflict us all, some maybe more than others. As it happens she doesn’t get to see the splatter and continues on to Media and Film School where she asks one of her professors to help her out on her thesis by providing her with precious info. Her thesis is on media and violence and she asks her professor to help her out by getting her some tapes of confiscated material. Later that night the professor pays a trip to the school library where he finds himself panicking as the lights suddenly go out. He stumbles into a screening room down a hall somewhere where he tries to gather himself and watch a tape he appears to have taken from the confiscated material. The next day, Angelica discovers her professor very dead, apparently having worked himself into a state over what he watched that even his inhaler couldn’t help him. Horrified yet intrigued, Angelica takes the video that he was watching out the VCR and heads off home where she finds she is unable to watch the tape being put off by the screams she hears from the very beginning of the tape. However, goaded on by Chema, a video-weirdo geek she has recently befriended at school, she hands him over the tape and he throws it on his machine. Angelica cannot bear to watch as the screams start up but Chema describes what he watches – a real snuff movie in which a young girl is beaten and tortured before being killed on film – all real. The twist is that Chema recognizes the girl on the tape – a student from the school who had disappeared around two years ago. Then they discover a major clue – that the film was made using digital zoom which was rare at the time the tape was recorded, and so they begin to try to unravel what happened to Vanessa, the girl murdered on the snuff movie. It soon transpires that the killer was most probably a person from the school itself, perhaps a fellow student still on campus or even a faculty member or part of the security or janitorial staff. From this point on the film becomes a tangled, twisting and winding mystery thriller with one person becoming the main suspect after the other. Just when the audience feels sure that they know who the killer really is, some new evidence shows up and all of a sudden we (the audience) isn’t so sure anymore, just like poor Angelica who seems to lurch from the arms of one potential killer to the other. Despite the solid two-hour length director Amenabar manages to keep interest from flagging and some of the credit for this should go the strong performances by the lead actors. What elevates this film from being just another psycho killer flick is the important questions that it raises along the way. The film manages to raise questions about that morbid curiosity that most of us harbour and some of us control better than others. What is it about violence and danger that is so magnetizing and so compelling? The film also asks questions about the nature of entertainment and entertainers and about the market always accommodating a demand for something however vile it may be. The film gives its
audience plenty to chew, even after the film is over. However
those expecting a film tinged with the supernatural element
of The Others will be very disappointed as this is not a horror
movie as such at all, even though the subject of snuff movies
is stuff of true horror. This is an interesting and thought-provoking
film with strong performances. No classic maybe but certainly
for a debut feature this is an exceptionally assured effort
indeed. The film won no less than 6 Spanish Goya Awards (Spanish
Oscars) including Best Film.
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