Film festival opens with story about Nobel Prize–winning novelist

Allow us to recommend four of the best at this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. For the full schedule, visit vlaff.org/.

THE DISTINGUISHED CITIZEN (Argentina) Uncomfortable questions about parochial small-mindedness, exploitation, class, and the very meaning of “culture” (look out for a searingly brilliant speech about that) swirl around inside this wonderfully ill-tempered film, which gets the gala opening spot at this year’s VLAFF. It all starts with famed novelist Daniel Mantovani accepting the Nobel Prize for literature with the declaration of his own artistic death. Declining much grander offers of attention, the depressed, Barcelona-based writer gradually returns after 40 years to his Argentine hometown of Salas, whereupon The Distinguished Citizen morphs into something like a backwoods horror film, offset, naturally, by some of the finer cinematic devices (witty compositions, punchy dialogue) at the disposal of directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn. Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, August 24 (7 p.m.)

THE UNTAMED (Mexico) As with Kill Me Please (see below), the use of oblique storytelling strategies gives Amat Escalante’s libidinous sci-horror flick a convincingly arty sheen. All you need to know going in is that a tentacled thing from another world is holed up in a barn, pleasuring (for the most part) its ecstasy-drunk human visitors. A young wife, her violently closeted husband, and her gay brother provide the narrative moves in a super-perverse setup that finally signs off with a killer punch line. Escalante’s film is wild and disturbing enough to hold its own in inevitable comparisons to Under the Skin and Andrzej Źuławski’s Possession, but if that’s what it takes to get you genre nerds into the theatre… Cinematheque, August 25 (9:15 p.m.) and September 2 (9:30 p.m.)

YOU’RE KILLING ME SUSANA (Mexico) The ubiquitous Gael García Bernal puts his considerable charm and equally substantial comic chops to good use as TV actor Eligio, who’s a bit too busy hitting on his soap-opera costar to realize that the titular wife, played by Spain’s luminous Verónica Echegui, has split for a writer’s college in wintry Iowa. He tracks her down, near-slapstick encounters with the TSA and Midwestern taxi drivers providing laugh-out-loud entertainment along the way, but the infidelity keeps impinging on both sides. You might want to slap them both, but the film’s intense likability wins out in spades—this is a mighty hard movie to resist—with added spice coming from its gentle lampooning of Mexican machismo and more trenchant (and satisfying) barbs at the expense of American bigotry. Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, August 26 (5:15 p.m.); Cinematheque, August 29 (9 p.m.)

KILL ME PLEASE (Brazil) A series of killings in Rio de Janeiro’s tony Barra da Tijuca neighbourhood grips the imaginations of a quartet of teen girls, especially dark-eyed and horny Bia, whose ghoulishness eventually starts to look like possession. Not that anything is all that explicit in this hyper-stylish (think recent Nicolas Winding Refn) not-quite horror movie, which manages to unsettle with something like the cinematic equivalent of negative space. In short, coming-of-age trauma and the fear of sex get an unforgettable, synth-drenched makeover in director Anita Rocha da Silveira’s outlandishly good debut. Cinematheque, August 26 (9:30 p.m.) and September 1 (9:15 p.m.)