‘Subsuelo’, another magnificent film by Fernando Franco about human desolation | Cinema: previews and reviews

Emotional emptiness can be even worse than pain or cruelty. Don’t express, don’t feel, don’t suffer, don’t enjoy. Coldness as a counterpoint to any type of affliction. In Fernando Franco’s cinema creatures are rarely shown. They do things just because; usually the most terrible. They are rigorous films about people drowning others while drowning themselves. And he rarely shows it. After The wound (2013), Die (2017) e The Rite of Spring (2022), terrifying, overwhelming and unhealthy, albeit with nuances of delicacy, the director hits rock bottom in his expression of the human condition with Subsoil. Another gut-wrenching film, another magnificent film.

From the formidable opening sequence, 12 minutes of restlessness, adolescent self-destruction and elliptical language, Subsoil unfolds like a familiar nightmare that hides a thriller psychological. A drama about the consequences of carelessness which, in reality, covers the past of the characters as much or more than the future. A story of revulsion and jealousy, of psychopathy and loss, which will cause all the more pain (of the good kind) the less we know about her story. Especially because its unique narrative modes, the work of Franco himself and Begoña Arostegui, who adapt a novel by the Argentine Marcelo Luján, turn into stimulating forms of suspense that conventional screenwriters would reveal in the first minutes: who the main characters are; how they connect to each other; and what happened after the fateful moment. A style somewhere between the elliptical, the raw, the natural and the elusive, which perhaps only lacks a more rounded ending. A closed ending which, in any case, gives the impression of not being the main objective of its creators.

The family farm where a good part of the film takes place (“The plot”, they call it; a beautiful house with a swimming pool in the middle of the countryside), the comings and goings of the characters through rooms and gardens and, even more, the frighteningly manipulative character of one of the characters, return the gaze towards Theorem, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his laconicism, his degradation and his ambiguity. However, while deeply authentic, the trio of names Franco ends up connecting with in different tonal and narrative spaces Subsoil It is composed of the following group: dryness by Michael Haneke; the talent of the Atom Egoyan of the nineties in expanding the absence of information, thus creating discomfort in the viewer with his particular formula; and Carlos Vermut’s malevolent ability to enter the ruin of the coldest desire.

Santiago Racaj, Franco’s regular photographer, this time replaces the greyish and beige tones, and the reduced depth of field of his previous works, with a bright and brilliant image, with a disturbing summer elegance that contrasts with the blackened soul of the protagonists. Meanwhile, the distressing use of diegetic music (playing from within) in two terrifying moments, the tight shots stretched out in time and the perfect performances (from newcomers and established ones) complete a fascinating film. A work which, paradoxically, and despite its volcanic themes, is much more whispered than shouted. The whisper of emotional emptiness that degenerates into the sinister. And without any explanation.