Showing posts with label hugo silva. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hugo silva. Show all posts

8 May 2015

Dead by Dawn 2015 - Musaranas (2015)

No comments:

Genre:
Horror, Thriller
Screened:
Dead By Dawn 2015
Rating: 15
Director:
Juanfer Andrés, Esteban Roel
Cast:
Macarena Gómez, Hugo Silva, Luis Tosar ,Tomás del Estal

Winning the audience award for best feature at Dead by Dawn is no small feat. The Edinburgh horror festival has a tight group of in-depth genre fanatics who know their stuff and get exposed to the newest and best once a year. Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel’s Musaranas (AKA Shrew’s Nest) is a beautiful powerhouse of dysfunctional family gothic not to be missed.

Montse (Macarena Gomez) is an agoraphobic dressmaker, confined to the cosy but isolated dwellings of her childhood home many years after her parents’ deaths. Hermana (Nadia de Santiago), Montse’s beautiful younger sister, has just turned 18 and is beginning to take her first steps into adult life. After finding a man unconscious with a broken leg in her stairwell, Montse makes a decision that sees her delicate world begin to unravel.

Sure Musaranas shares its lonely spinster story with Misery, but that’s about the only parallel. Andres and Roel have, impressively, left all vestiges of similar thematic endeavours out in the cold by making sure Musaranas is 100% its own beast. Everything about the story, characters, events, and even locations is distinctly infused with clean-cut insanity and dilute garishness. Misery is winter gothic, bound to the isolation of the Colorado Mountains, where Musaranas is equally reliant on the vibrant social atmosphere of its small town.

Musaranas is wise not to operate beyond its brief. It doesn’t push itself so far that the weight of its finely tuned black humour crushes the horror aspect, or vice versa. Andres and Roel know exactly when they want us to laugh, cover our eyes, and sit right on the precipice of our seats just waiting to see where this domestic nightmare will turn next.

Macarena Gomez steals the show, there’s no way around it. Her particular brand of matriarchal madness is an absolutely arresting delight. Thankfully Gomez understands that insanity is a difficult sell: often silly when handled incorrectly. But in Musaranas her portrayal of the delicate Montse is somewhere between prim and perverted, a pitch-perfect horror character with as much depth and heart as any of the genre’s best villains. Luis Tosar (Sleep Tight) appears as the girls’ fierce father, every bit the bad guy but touchingly subject to his own foul demons. It’s a hard thing to pull off a guy like this whilst enabling the audience some window into his mind, but its executed wonderfully.


An incredible piece of work for a debut feature; tightly edited and written, expertly cast, and sporting a slew of finely tuned comic, horror, and family themes in such a concise way it’s impossible not to enjoy. Musaranas is a perfect vignette, a peek into the bubbling hive of anxiety that is family.

★★★★
Scott Clark


29 April 2013

I'm So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros) Review

No comments:
A Everyman Cinema has opened in Leeds and the first in the North. It’s a nice digital cinema in the new Trinity shopping complex in the city centre of Leeds. The first week of it’s opening has had many Q&As and special showings. The first of 2 I went to was a preview of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film I’m So Excited.

I’m So Excited is the first pure comedy since his international sensation Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988. That film broke his strange brand of filmmaking into the public consciousness. He has tend to move away from comedy since then and has moved more into Douglas Sirk inspired melodramas and Hitchcockian thrillers. All his films feature his strange brand of kitschy humour, transsexual or cross-dressing characters and normally but not always a strong female lead character. I tend to prefer his more serious films like Law of Desire, Bad Education and the recent The Skin I Live In.

I’m So Excited is basically a classic sex comedy but with a twist. It’s all set on a plane (for the most part) and they having problems with the landing gear and have to keep flying in circles. The film revolves mainly about the exploits of the 3 gay stewards on the plane. They drink like fish and do plenty of drugs. While they face possible death they have to entertain and serve the passengers as well as they can. However nothing quite goes well and life is as complicated in the clouds as it is on the ground.

It’s a self-described “very light comedy” and it’s fine but serviceable. It has it moments especially when they make the Valencia cocktail spiked with mescaline However it is lacking any of the real substance his finest films have or the classic absurdity of Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It perfectly fine but of a man who has such a solid body of work reaching back to the early 80s I can’t help but feel slightly disappointed.

★★★☆☆

Ian Schultz

StarsJavier Cámara, Hugo Silva , Cecillia Roth,Pepa Charro, Lola Dueñas
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Release: 3rd of May 2013
Certificate: 15 (UK)