The Untamed

Synopsis

“Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante’s work has included the challengingly violent crime drama Heli (2013). Now he has created a bizarre realist-fantasy parable in which queasy eroticism and body horror are absorbed into life’s many pains and injustices. It is set in Guanajuato in central Mexico, which Escalante’s movie endows with a forbidding remoteness. (…) This movie has the spirit of Buñuel in many ways, also Guillermo del Toro, and maybe even Ridley Scott’s Alien. But I found myself thinking of Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, in which Céline, played by Julie Delpy, wonders what would happen if scientists invented some kind of metal probe that would give lab rats pure sexual pleasure: she imagines the wretched beasts abandoning everything, including food and water, to rub themselves against this probe all day while their little faces become increasingly addled. The Untamed is about what would happen if there was some of kind of organism, kept in captivity, that could deliver exactly this kind of pleasure; an organism in touch with a fiercer, purer, deeper and more primitive sexual pleasure of which our evolved species has up until now only ever had an unsatisfactory and partial glimpse.(…) This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

Around The World in 14 Films 2017, presented by Dietrich Brüggemann

Theatrical release Germany: Spring 2018!