The Untamed
“The Untamed” is a clinical movie in the lineage of “The Witch” and “The Lobster” — films that bash the viewer’s head in with the dangers of sex and monstrous humans. It’s by Mexican director Amat Escalante, who won the Silver Lion for at last year’s Venice Film Festival for his direction. Escalante has many interesting ideas, but he doesn’t explore them to the lengths they deserve.
The opening shot — the camera tracks back on a nude woman named Veronica (Simone Bucio) to reveal a supernatural gimmick that I won’t spoil — sets the movie’s goal to be grotesque for the sake of intellectual grotesquerie. Veronica is a pretty mystery girl in a backwoods cabin, run by a “Rosemary’s Baby”ish old couple with unclear, sinister goals. She goes out into the larger world to bring back people to the cabin — and she finds an interesting case in Angel ( Jesus Meza) and Alejandra (Ruth Ramos), who are married with two boys. Angel has a male lover. Alejandra is strangely attracted to Veronica, whose presence arouses Alejandra’s repressed sexual desires, her husband’s and the gossip of their homophobic Mexican community.
Escalante must be lauded for his ambition. Occasionally, one of his non-allegorical images excites the mind with its genuine unsettlingness — for instance, at breakfast, when one of Alejandra’s boys scratches a bad red rash that smothers his face, while the other knocks a glass of chocolate milk off the table. Alejandra’s bland reaction is just to “Watch out.” Later, when a doctor’s battered body is fished out from a water hole, it looks like something out of a weird Italian hedonist’s painting — the locals sit and watch in wide-eyed wonder, while animals graze nonchalantly in the background.
Other than that, “The Untamed” pushes all its interesting ideas to the background, and uses a contrived monster metaphor to expose what Escalante seems to think are subtle truisms: Humans are homophobic and sexist and terrible. The hackneyed sheep and crucifix imagery — and a scene with horny animals that rivals the accidental camp of “The Witch” — give the impression of an impressively cold world (the images are by the Chilean cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, a regular Lars Von Trier collaborator) crammed into exactingly worked-out proofs. The unsure approach to rich material (based on a story about a newspaper’s homophobic coverage of a drowned man) mixes the sexy and grotesque — and cancels each other’s good parts out.