Amat Escalante’s La Region Selvaje (2017)
As far as body-horror goes, this one has the quiet merit of embedding this story in a very ordinary human petri dish, an unassuming network of four young dead-enders: the wandering rootless woman, the gay nurse in the province, the closeted macho, and the struggling, lovelorn young mother of two.
Both sex scenes in this feature film, one between the married couple and one between the men, are perfunctory single shots, with no palpable joy, let alone a shred of mystery delivered by belabored lighting or breathless scores.
Yet here is how some of the bylines read:
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: The Untamed review — a film about love, pleasure and a tentacular sex monster.
SFGate’s Carlos Valladares: Erotic Mexican thriller “The Untamed” a hodgepodge of good ideas
The New York Times’A.O.Scott: In ‘The Untamed,’ Close Encounters. No, Even Closer.
Even ostensibly deadbeat sexuality is still fogging up the deeper crevices of Escalante’s fictional proposition. This is reflected in the all pervasive choice of publicity stills as well, the majority of them went with the imagine of an imobilized Alejandra in a recumbent position, in bed, ready to be swooned or served as fodder to the creature. I’ll return to the arc of her character later, for now let this choice of image register.
These three chosen reviewers describe the creature that is serving as the McGuffin here as a “tentacular sex monster”, “alien” and, more interestingly, by Guy Lodge from Variety as “a writhing, amorphous, many-tentacled creature, sequestered in a dark chamber, that becomes an unlikely instrument of sexual agency and self-realization to those who submit to it.” Is it not fair to say that in any horror movie the abhorrent creature is a pretext for anxiety and fright to play out? In this case, the all-consuming power of erotic longing engenders havoc for all those who come to contact with it. The confined sexuality all of these four main characters practiced before their encounters with the creature, is briefly touched upon by most reviewers under lenses of homophobia, and the subalternity of women in Latin cultures.
But none of them seem to highlight what I found the most disturbing quality this otherworldly creature is endowed with, a highly relatable human foible: it gets bored of recurring partners and starts to bite back, as was the case with Alejandra’s predecessor, Veronica. The damaging attacks happen when that electric connection of intimacy starts to loose voltage. I was going to write that it needs novel ecstasy, but we are not even privy to what the creature gets out of these encounters, other than ennui. Judging by the belated, explicit scene of the rendez-vous with Alejandra, the women finally get all of their erogenous zones taken care of by a dedicated, ever indulging tentacle, a task beyond any single human lover. Neither the director nor these reviewers spend time pondering what might the creature absorb: does it nourish itself with human lubrication? Does it regulate its thermostat by contact with human skin?
Peter Bradshaw reminds us of the irrelevance of the monster per se in this comment:” It might be possible to create a version of this film in which the creature is never shown, or in which it does not exist: a version in which the non-sci-fi realist love triangle of homophobia and loneliness is the only thing that matters.” In which case, refashioning fantastic realism, body horror into a kitchen sink drama, as if the master referent was Look Back in Anger, and the retroactive glance at the Empire’s dusty templates was of the essence. Here too Bradshaw seems to be talking about bourgeois dread more than anything else: “These are people plodding along with their lives quite accustomed to the continual nagging state of dissatisfaction and yearning that keeps them moving forward, like a donkey with a carrot dangled in front of it.” Perhaps I can understand this comment if we replace carrot with the promise of full participation in a vaster reference production landscape. The world that I saw pictured onscreen brings complex, contradictory subjectivities in folks struggling through the Sisyphus task of everyday life in one of the many places in this planet left in worst shape by colonialism.
A.O Scott chimes in with: “And so he turns a downbeat melodrama of unhappy marriage, bohemian drift and sexual duplicity into something bizarre and horrific.” This begs us to scan our memories for the ratio of Mexican productions of mere “unhappy marriage, bohemian drift and sexual duplicity” against those that pander to poverty porn, hyper violence or sundry exotica. What international viewership is there for run of the mill human stories coming from post-colonies?
Note how even Carlos Valladares from SF Gate feels compelled to gage the film’s merits by comparing it to known quantities: “The Untamed” is a clinical movie in the lineage of “The Witch” and “The Lobster” — films that bash the viewer’s head in with the dangers of sex and monstrous humans. It’s by Mexican director Amat Escalante, who won the Silver Lion for at last year’s Venice Film Festival for his direction. Escalante has many interesting ideas, but he doesn’t explore them to the lengths they deserve.”
The voice over used in most versions of the trailer includes a brief explanation by the elder scientist who houses and studies this peculiar beast. The town “expert” states: “It is the primitive part in all of us, which is never going to be extinguished, it will just keep perfecting itself.” We remain free to equate primitive with Latin America or our own nether regions. The original title La Region Selvaje/The Savage Region, supports that duplicitousness, that goes unremarked by most reviews. This glaring omission gets compounded by the fact that Escalante’s prior film Heli focuses on cartel violence. So here we are, Latin American filmmakers, peddlers of hyperviolence and “wild” sexuality, in all our demented exuberance.
None of the reviewers make the connection of the opening sequence — where a possible asteroid drops the creature in the woods of Guanajuato — which gets ample mention everywhere, to this internal force which “lives in all of us.” This very contradiction, a thing from outer space versus the evil within (which would give the film depth and universality, in the eye of the beholder), is hardly problematized, and in so doing, maintains the beast as an outpost of the id, perhaps by extension, making the Latin American subject just as primitive.
Picking up on the arc of Alejandra, I can think of at least one meaningful blind spot in most of these reviews. Here’s Bradshaw’s reduction: “Its huge python tentacles slither into every orifice creating an unforgettable addiction that makes anything else the characters happen to be doing with their lives seem bland and unreal. This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.” He creates a picture of Alejandra as defined by an abnormal eroticism which goes stricly counter to what happens in the tail end of the third act. She returns to retrieve her kids from the grips of a domineering mother-in-law, she does anything but relinquish her agency, affirming herself as a responsible caretaking adult. We also watch an altercated embrace between a father and son that hints at forgiveness for the son’s queer sexuality. These strike me as a far cry from the blunt alienation suffered in many other narratives of sexual deviance in small towns.
My larger point here is that in overlooking the film’s more subtle subversions, and creating a frame that is delimited by basal urges merely lifting characters out of their drab existence, a containment of the vitality of a sprawling Latino cinematic production, enforces a territorialization that is coherent with the agenda of center-periphery binaries.
