I finally got around to watching Tesis, a Spanish horror/suspense movie by the director of Abre Los Ojos (remade as Vanilla Sky) and The Others.

It’s an early effort, and not at all as polished as his later work, but it’s very effective. It’s not a horror movie per se, but it’s definitely a suspense movie, to an extreme degree. It shouldn’t really work, using clichéd conceits like snuff movie production rings and multiple twists as to who our main suspects are, but it does. The twists come a little thick at the end, and it becomes a bit hard to believe, but in general, it’s very edge of your seat stuff.

Some nice touches, too. There are several nice reveals. When Angela, the protagonist, first gets her hands on a snuff tape, she’s uncertain what’s on it, but suspects that it’s something horrible. So she turns the brightness on her TV down as she’s starting to watch it, and all we get is the sound, screaming and begging. Later, when she’s showing it to her friend, he watches, but she can’t, and neither can the audience, until she finally peeks between her fingers, and we see what’s going on. It’s quite nice, by the time we see parts of the tape, the sound’s made us imagine far worse things than what we actually see.

There’s also a “trapped in the dark” sequence around the middle of the movie that’ll freak out anyone with claustrophobia, and Angela’s fear is often very believable and real.

On the negative side, there are a few very convenient turns and some hard to believe setups. The Chema character is kind of a stereotype, especially in the beginning, as a dorky, antisocial horror nerd. He gets a bit more depth later on, and becomes more likable, but he could still have done with at least a couple of personality traits that went against type.

Also, while the “message” of the movie, seeing snuff films as just an extreme version of commercial cinema’s “give the audience what they want” philosophy works, it’s not that hard to tell what the writer/director thinks of that particular attitude, and that makes it unsurprising when the college professor who espouses it turns out to be one of the snuff-producing bad guys. In the end, though, the movie redeems itself by saying, as it’s been hinting all along, that we are the consumers of this, our morbid curiosity is what drives it. It’s not particularly profound, but it’s well executed.

All in all, though, this is good suspense stuff, well worth watching if you like stuff like Silence of the Lambs.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Horror, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.