“I have little faith in words.” -Lisandro Alonso
Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 drama Los Muertos demands your attention without necessarily commanding it. There’s a difference. Los Muertos is leisurely and not at all urgent, but it is methodical, and capable of conjuring startling emotion with the smallest of steps and simplest of movements. It’s impossible to look away. The dreamlike two-minute opening is seemingly filmed from the perspective of a man lost in a jungle, and the camera weaves wondrously through the underbrush, occasionally glancing up at the beaming sunlight before finally settling on a scene of horrific violence: two dead boys, butchered and splayed out on the dirt. The brief suggestion of a passing man holding a bloody knife flashes across the screen, but Alonso cuts away before we can we see his face, let alone process the scene as a whole.
The sequence is an example of one of two aspects you generally see in an Alonso film. Some are intricately staged, others are simple static shots, but they both usually unfurl in long, unbroken takes that plunge the viewer directly into the film’s reality. He’s hardly the first director to use the camera in such a way, and he was hardly the last, if the last ten years of world art cinema are any indication. But his approach is unique in the way his images do more speaking than any of his characters. Los Muertos, like Alonso’s La Libertad (2001) and Liverpool (2008), the other films in what’s known unofficially as his “Lonely Man Trilogy,” focuses on feelings of solitude and isolation, but it doesn’t always rely on its enigmatic protagonist to express those emotions. Instead, you feel it in the sensorial details that spill out of virtually every frame, in the textures and movements of life as depicted by Alonso.
Indeed, we don’t know much about Vargas (Argentino Vargas), the figure at the center of Los Muertos. We know that he’s making a long and taxing journey home through a dense and underpopulated patch of Argentinian jungle; we know he’s just served a lengthy prison sentence; and we know that he doesn’t talk much. Whenever he encounters other people, he treats them with a sort of icy passive-aggression, his emotions withheld; the most deliberate thing he does is kill and skin a goat, slicing its throat and letting its blood pool on the floor of his boat, and the implication that he’s committed this act on his human counterparts hangs over the film like a specter. But there are more important details at work here. Alonso’s formal certitude ensures that his every moment has a sort of predetermined significance. What gradually emerges is a synthesis of man, movement and nature, a passageway into the heart of someone whose intentions seem as obvious as they do inscrutable.
Whether or not Vargas is a serial murderer is a question the director is perfectly pleased to leave unanswered. The film’s denouement, chilling as it is, doesn’t offer any clues. The film is structured like a linear horror film, but rather than build suspense, Alonso underplays it, looking the other way whenever violence seems inevitable. That’s not to say that violence is off the table, as the opening sequence and goat-killing scene prove, but that the act is less momentous than the suggestion, or more accurately, the idea. Rather than pursue violent images, Alonso is after violent thoughts, communicated in his protagonist’s observed behavior that resonates on an almost cosmic level. We don’t always know what Vargas is thinking, but we often have an idea of what he’s feeling, and that’s because we see what he’s doing. It sounds reductive and maybe even simplistic, but when you consider the outsized emotion and narrative embellishments of the prison dramas that are the film’s nominal kin, Los Muertos’s meditative realism and thoughtful ambiguity feels both eerily human and genuinely transformative. It’s the kind of film you can live in.
Part of that has to do with Alonso’s ability to impart the sights, sounds and feelings of his locations. The harsh jungle in Los Muertos restricts its inhabitants to orderly routine, and Vargas must adhere to certain behaviors lest he succumb to his surroundings. Alonso, meanwhile, isn’t quite as fixed to the landscape, and he often gazes away from his protagonist and luxuriates in the setting. (In one particularly overwhelming sequence, Vargas hops out the bed of a truck, and the camera watches him as he recedes into the distance until he vanishes into his surroundings, at which point the camera slowly turns its gaze toward the sky above.) But he isn’t capturing these images for their mere beauty. The director focuses on the lush greenery and expansive skies in such a way that certainly remind us of their beauty but also register just how distressingly lush and expansive it all is. Vargas doesn’t betray a single emotion throughout the entire film, but his journey through the jungle can be seen as a stressful attempt at survival. His actions drip with desperation, and so do we.
Ultimately, Los Muertos is a sort of open-world horror film about a landscape where violence is inherent to everyday life. We might not learn a lot about Vargas or any other of Alonso’s characters, but we see their behavior conditioned by the severe environments they move through. Vargas is surrounded by beauty, but it’s an unforgiving beauty, the kind that reduces his agency to the basic functions of survival. It’s the kind of beauty, as the film unsettlingly suggests, that might turn murder into a reflex. Los Muertos is a film that truly exists “in the moment”—in the moment of an impulsive act of a violently desperate man; in the moment when the camera unmoors itself from character fixation and becomes the roving agent for a filmmaker’s awe-inspiring vision; and in the moment when unknowable and unspeakable emotions burst to life before our eyes.
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