31 Days of Halloween, Day 17- The Untamed (2016)

Directed By: Amat Escalante

Top 8 Cast: Jesús Meza, Ruth Ramos, Simone Bucio, Eden Villavicencio, Andrea Peláez, Oscar Escalante, Bernarda Trueba, Enoc Leaño

Plot: Alejandra’s machismo husband is a closeted gay man having an affair with her brother. In public, he is the most virulent of homophobes. There’s also a squid alien in a shack that fucks good, but he’s turning violent.

Response: When you can’t ride your motorcycle cuz you’ve got a christ wound in your side from boning octopus monsters. Watching zombie movies with your kids while Dad’s in the slammer. Riding through the mists. There’s a crater on the earth where the animals go to fuck. Jesus is another taxidermic hunting trophy. And I’ve long felt like curving tree roots looked like undulating tentacles. Just cool to see I’m not the only one. Throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care. Piss on the floor. Beat some dudes up. Grab your wife’s hair. Cry in your abusive father’s arms. Untamed GOES there dawg. 2nd best squid monster fuck flick after Żuławski’s Possesion.

Background & Analysis: The Untamed won the silver lion award for directing at the 73rd International Venice Film Festival.

Taking a cursory glance at Escalante’s filmography it seems to be the strangest. I’ve noticed this with contemporary arthouse directors, lots of gritty, apparently realist, stuff tackling gang violence or drug addiction and then one stand-out film of explicit high weirdness.*

The movie is a head-on examination of the pain of the closet and the damning effects of machismo culture on sensitive men. But it’s also about addiction. The squid beast itself is a complicated metaphor that I can’t quite place. It’s connected to two scientists (Biologists? Astronomers?) who serve as its pimps so perhaps one could link their endeavors with rationalist-materialism to society’s homophobia. A big swing, I know, with the only connective fibers being an all-pervasiveness in popular consciousness. Society, by and large, fights to adhere to both scientific rationalism and heteronormativity. Except that the scientific mindset, as opposed to the religious** tends to more willingly accept sexual diversity.

The movie seems to be about impulse and animalism (untamedness). Addictive impulses, sexual impulses, violent impulses. So then, wait, is the movie anti-gay? Positing that we should rise above a base instinct for homosex? Clearly not, or the scenes of pain would not be so clearly articulated and chillingly realized. And if the alien represents pure id, our most primitive urges, then why does it come from beyond the stars? Wouldn’t that id state be innate and not alien in origin? Unless we’re aliens, and the solar system (divorced from its typical sci-fi connotations of operatic future travel and deep loneliness) is more natural than life on earth, or at least society. An originary position linking us to our initiation as star light? But that, too, seems a bit more haunting than what this movie offers up.

The tentacle, in horror, conjures up immediate thoughts of Lovecraft. But this doesn’t quite have the taste of cosmic horror. More of weird parable.

I’d read that the inspiration from the film came from a tabloid article the director read exploiting the death of a gay man, reveling in corpse photos and reducing a community member to two things: his sexuality and his death. A deeply sad and disgusting moment of news as entertainment revealing culture’s sickness. This moment does appear in the film too, in a memorable moment of character deepening when Angel’s mother picks him up from prison and tosses a similar tabloid in his lap.

Using this scene and this moment from the director’s life*** as the key a lot gets unlocked. If we consider both this tabloid and the squid monster as base then the monster represents not our own individualized sexual expressions but the base sickness of an uncaring society. The monster becomes simply what it is, a monster. Something to be feared and reckoned with, no matter how many delicious orgasms it gives us. The monster is society. That it comes, in this case, from outer space is simply because monsters often come from outer-space in stories. This is a story. Outer-space monster stories are cool.

Whew!

Thanks for sticking with me while I worked that one out.

I’ve got one more thought too but it contains SPOILERS.

In our Day 15 pick, The Phantom Carriage, female, Christian sacrifice is offered to save a bad husband, nearly 100 years later the husband himself is offered up as Pagan lamb before an eldritch tentacle beast.

Rich stuff.

Second Opinions:

“..director, Amante Escalante really shines not just in the erotic sci-fi horror elements but also in the human drama, perfectly capturing the mercurial complexities of gender, sexuality and violence…Even if you are not a huge tentacle porn fan, I urge you to check this out. ” -  Disgustipated on Letterboxed

"Reminded me of the films of Reygadas, and at some points even von Trier’s “Antichrist”.” - Dada Rubin on Letterboxed

“I just wish this movie leaned harder into the weird. The hints at the fantastical I was loving, but ultimately felt it left me with frustratingly little of it.” - Paul Thomas on Letterboxed

“..a genre film for people who find genre films distasteful.” - Angelo Murreda, Cinemascope

Scores:

Autumn Vibes: 1/5

Scares & Chills: 1/5

Cultual & Cinematice Importance: 3/5

Monster Action: 4/5

* Other examples of this: Denis Villeneuve (weird flick- Maelström), Carlos Reygadas (weird flick- Post Tenebras Lux), Eimar Baigazin (weird flick- The Wounded Angel), Tsai Ming-liang (weird flick- The Wayward Cloud), Claire Denis (weird flick- Trouble Every Day), etc… This is all conjecture and may be an inaccurate read especially since in some of these cases the “weird” flick is the only one from that particular director I’ve seen.

** Oh, and there’s plenty of religious stuff in this movie too!

***The moment of seeing the newspaper story