The untamed, venice review: mexican creature feature with an oozy orgy of special effects

DIRECTOR: AMAT ESCALANTE; STARRING: RUTH RAMOS, SIMONE BUCIO, JESÚS MEZA, EDÉN VILLAVICENCIO. CERT TBC, 100 MINS The title character, or creature, or thing, of Amat Escalante’s The Untamed 

goes unnamed – and perhaps, if you’re spoiler-phobic, is also best left mostly undescribed.  The Mexican provocateur’s fourth feature – a gamy mash of social-realist candour and malarial sex

nightmare that chills and agitates without ever quite sating the weird appetites it stirs – centres on a chalet in a sheep pasture somewhere in central Mexico. Within live a middle-aged

couple, a large black dog, and something in the woodshed that came down on a meteor. From the opening sequence, we know it has at least one tentacle and a novel sense of what to do with it.

There’s a young woman, Veronica (Simone Bucio), slumped naked against a wooden post and groaning in otherworldly pleasure, and this slippery appendage – plus whatever it’s attached to – is

the avid pleasure-giver.  How exactly this creature connects to a more workaday story of marital betrayal and covert homosexuality in a nearby town is the game The Untamed plays over 100

inventive minutes. It’s a little reminiscent of the erotic rural fantasias of France’s Alain Guiraudie – most of all The King of Escape, his jaunty sylvan romp of 2009, in which a sad-sack

gay tractor salesman launches into a frenzied heterosexual fling thanks in part to a magic aphrodisiac root. But Escalante’s film is blunter and more didactic, and also scaldingly

pessimistic: no surprise if you’ve seen his earlier films, which include Heli, Los Bastardos and his unreleased-in-the-UK debut, Sangre. Veronica drifts into the lives of Alejandra (Ruth

Ramos) and Ángel (Jesús Meza), a young married couple whose love-life is significantly less fulfilling than that of whatever-it-is in the shed. That’s partly because Ángel is having an

affair with Alejandra’s brother Fabian (Edén Villavicencio), a nurse at the town hospital – an entirely physical relationship Escalante depicts with characteristic frankness, and which must

remain deathly secret because of the taboo nature of gay sex in their town as much as to cover Ángel’s infidelity. Alejandra’s friendship with Veronica leads to her discovering the creature

and availing herself of its services, which are shown in a once-seen-never-forgotten sequence with enough detail to trigger my gag reflex – and it can’t help but recall similar encounters in

the HP Lovecraft short story The Dunwich Horror and the famous Hokusai woodcut of a female diver being ravished by two octopuses. In fact, the creature’s mere presence in the area whips the

local wildlife into a perpetual amorous reverie, and Escalante throws in a brief multi-species orgy scene featuring sheep, ducks, snakes, armadillos and even a pair of tortoises which is

almost worth an entire star in itself. The relationship between the thing and the humans it attracts is clear enough: it represents their desires at the most pure and writhing level, and

inevitably all who encounter it are drawn back like addicts, with increasingly deadly results. But Escalante’s characters aren’t written or performed with the kind of emotional detail that

invests you in their fates, and aside from the film’s central horrific _coup-de-Jung_, there isn’t much that lingers in the mind afterwards. This is a fascinating and outrageous next step

for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one. Best films of 2016