The physical and verbal abuse heaped upon Tamara, who looks to be experiencing a psychotic break, is often untenable and made even more cringey by the script’s skewed stabs at dark humor. It’s an undeniably tough watch, but the actors infuse the strange bond between their characters with a compelling grit. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: they can’t go on. They must go on. The same applies to anyone watching this movie.
The bloodlust for revenge that drives Steppenwolf likewise serves as a plot device in Penalty Loop, a surprisingly gutsy new take on the Groundhog Day scenario from Japanese director Shinji Araki. Without giving too much away, the story revolves around the efforts of Jun (Ryuya Wakaba) to avenge his girlfriend’s murder by an older factory worker named Mizoguchi (Yusuke Iseya).
He succeeds but wakes up the next day only to find he has to do it all over again – and it’s never going to be as easy because the killer is reliving the same day, too. That this premise leads not into a black pool of soul-crushing angst but is, ultimately, an emotionally delicate comedy about the human condition testifies to Araki’s depth of feeling for his characters and the horrible situations they find themselves in and to his belief in a redemptive force. Twists abound, and while the plot also superficially evokes the perverse cyber nightmares of Black Mirror, Araki is leaning more securely into Japanese cinema’s bent for quirky characters and anthropological observation. It’s a soulful study of the uselessness of violence.
It takes a little while to get the hang of the desaturated, post-something-awful reality of Parvulos. This movie begins with the eldest of three brothers mixing up his morning breakfast cocktail of freshly dug up and blenderized worms with, uh … honey. While certainly nutritious, this diet is soon revealed to be one of necessity, as this close-knit family is in deep survivalist mode, coping with a scary new world that has been devastated by an apparent viral outbreak.
Parvulos
As the movie progresses, more is revealed about its nature and the casualties in its wake, but director Isaac Ezban is more interested in (budding) adolescence than the apocalypse and the taut, fierce ties that bind brothers against dangerous and unruly forces – including those deep within their own compound. The young principal cast (Mateo Ortega Casillas, Leonardo Cervantes, Farid Escalante Correa) gives exceptional performances, full of urgency and humor, while the barebones production impressively engineers multiple bursts of s**t-your-pants horror.
Even though a cow gets zapped by lightning, let’s all rest assured that no farm animals were harmed in Electrophilia. As for the humans, it’s a bit more complicated. This Fantasia fave from novelist and director Lucia Puenzo (XXY) further explores her interest in the transformative potential of the human body. This theme here tiptoes toward the Cronenbergian kink of Crash, although much more charged with a romantic quality that has an artful, lyrical tilt.
After veterinarian Ada (Mariana Di Girolamo) is struck along with the cow she is tending to in an open field and awakes from a coma, she finds it impossible to go back to her old life. Instead, with her body marked by the jolt that passed through her (the so-called Lichtenberg scars), she is drawn towards a cult-like community of fellow survivors, led and treated by the enigmatic physician Juan (German Palacios) who has devised a kind of electroshock therapy. It’s one that, for Ada, at least, offers an erotic intensity that soon is matched by a physical and spiritual connection with Juan.
As Ada pursues dangerous engagement with light sockets and other sources of electricity, the story might have veered fully into the realm of anxious and explosive body horror; instead, the intriguing premise leads to a more introspective journey, one that is no less haunting given Di Girolamo’s fearless commitment to her performance and the screenplay’s own circuit box of surprises.
