In the most striking scene from Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante’s notorious Cannes winner Heli, a man held captive by a violent drug cartel has his genitals doused in gasoline and set on fire. The horrific moment is tempered by the director’s casual approach; he films the scene like it’s the sort of thing that happens every day, which somehow makes it that much more gruesome. In his latest feature, the horror-melodrama-sci-fi hybrid The Untamed, Escalante applies this visual stoicism to a cosmic scenario. As in Heli, he uses the concept of a nuclear family to explore the underlying insidiousness of contemporary Mexican society. But rather than folding under the pressure of the drug war, the characters here are undone by their burning sexual attraction to a tentacled space creature. With a serious mind and an even more serious camera, Escalante seeks to explore the balance between desire and suffering, but the literal-mindedness that defines his style also undermines the inherent pleasures of the genres he’s utilizing.
The film’s closing credits offer special thanks to the recently deceased filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, a necessary tip of the hat given that The Untamed borrows key plot points and images from Possession, the Polish filmmaker’s most famous work. Nobody who’s seen Zulawski’s feverish horror film could mistake the elements that Escalante borrows here, most notably the writhing, wriggling squid-like monster sequestered in a deep, dark chamber that becomes the instrument of sexual agency for all who succumb to it. The creature can provide euphoric pleasure, but like something as profound and equivocal as desire, it also has the capacity to inflict horrible pain. The uncertainty of which it will be—euphoria or pain—appears to be part of the thrill for the characters, even if such dogged single-mindedness is anathema to both compelling drama and actual human behavior.
The characters in question are a tight-knit group: Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) has two precocious children with her churlish and blue-collar husband, Ángel (Jesús Meza); her brother is the openly gay Fabián (Eden Villavicencio), who’s having a heated affair with Ángel behind her back. Fabián is a nurse and one day he befriends the lonely Verónica (Simone Bucio), who comes to the ER with a gaping wound she claims she got from a dog-bite. Verónica, however, is an early convert of the squid creature, which is locked away and looked after by a pair of mystic healers deep in rural Guanajuato. Her once joyous encounters with the creature have taken a turn for the worse, but that doesn’t stop her from sharing her secret with Fabián and Alejandra, the results of which are by turns tragic, transcendent and deadly.
The fact that there isn’t much of a range between all the tragedy and transcendence and death denies the material some much needed distinction – not to mention inner meaning. The creature is said to provide either pain or pleasure, but there’s no real connection between this idea and the film’s depiction of domestic life and sexual violence. Alejandra’s toxic marriage to the violent, unfaithful Ángel, who takes out his guilt and self-loathing on a complicit Fabián, is set apart from the film’s fantastical aspects and is more illustrative of Mexico’s sexual and social discrimination. The film is bluntly sexual and graphic in nature, but contrary to its title, it does little to subvert any long-held notions of desire or sexuality. Additionally, the body horror doesn’t add any symbolism to the proceedings, and Escalante seems to actively avoid the most tantalizing aspects of his science-fiction premise aside from the opening shot of a hulking asteroid spinning through the cosmos, later implied to be the very vessel that brought the alien squid to our world.
Indeed, there’s not a lot of poetry in The Untamed. But what it lacks in lyricism it makes up for in visceral impact, which ultimately provides its own kind of catharsis. There are arresting and oddly beautiful images of human limbs intertwined with fleshy tentacles, plus a surreal moment of what can only be described as a multispecies animal orgy that takes place in the charred earth where the creature was discovered. In these moments and others, elements of the otherworldly and supernatural bleed into Escalante’s carefully orchestrated realism, creating a sense of the inhuman slowly creeping into our plane of existence, akin to the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The genderless, pansexual creature at the center of it all is kept disturbingly unfamiliar, a product of both its own low-lit surroundings and, more crucially, our own increasingly frazzled imaginations. In a film starved for nuance and ambiguity – not to mention a heartier affinity for the genres to which it nominally belongs – perhaps it’s only appropriate that the most intriguing story takes place in our mind.
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