DIE, MONSTER, DIE, the horror in Latin-American Criticism

A genre film from Argentina who launches us on the trail of a killer in the Cordillera of the Andes. Selected at Cannes in the un Certain Regard category.

The wilderness of South america. Here and there, a few flakes of snow in the white. In very broad, two police cars approach slowly from a farm, the piercing light of the headlamps. The goats bêlent, then the officers out of the vehicles, appealing to a man. The camera had only a light crop, panotant to accompany the vehicles in the way that they have respectively borrowed. This scene unfolds in the middle of an imposing scenery, which seems ready to swallow everything. The police is seeking the head of a victim freshly decapitated. Agent Cruz is found, lying not far away, near the snout of a pig dozing off. Welcome to the genre cinema of Argentina.

Starting as a thriller, this new film ofAlejandro Fadel will gradually mutate during a first hour that we clutched to the throat. Intense and haunting, she takes us on an earth naked and cold, in the filth and the putrid, in the midst of images of madness and the superb mouth of the actors. Party in search of a killer of women, Cruz is going to have to question his judgement when it comes in contact with the husband of his mistress, after the death of the latter. Therefore, a first toggle takes place, the film leans on the side of thriller, esoteric, before diving into the fantastic. The inner demons haunting the protagonists are surface and an inner voice the torment. She whispers ” Die, Monster, Die “.

“Abstruse, jester and gore, the film is walking on the steep trails of Lynch and Jodorowsky.”

The story rout since it focuses on inertia. The plans last, the dialogues are interspersed with many breaks, and the scenography is slow. Paradoxically, the mystery deepens as it unfolds. Cruz begins to doubt his innocence and we also. And since it shares the inner voices of the main suspect, why would it not be two people at once ? While the madness seems very close, supported by the sound, treated in a mind-blowing new elements are transforming DIE, MONSTER, DIE in a monster movie completely covered.

It is not always encircles not where wants to take us history and physics of the beast, finally visible, is a bad joke. In turn abstruse, jester and gore, the film is walking on the steep trails of Lynch and Jodorowsky , and provides us with some rhetorical aesthetic frissonnantes. However, it loses in its last part, a sort of homage to the film Grindhouse, which does not solve anything.

Review published on may 13, 2018 at the screening at the Cannes film Festival

Loris Colecchia