Darwin's Law Gets The Horror Treatment
Woe unto the filmmaker who doesn't live up to our expectations. Today's object lesson: the Argentinean director Israel Adrian Caetano and his new movie, "Chronicle of an Escape," which makes its premiere at the IFC Center today. The true story of a professional soccer player who was rounded up by a paramilitary task force, accused of being a revolutionary, and imprisoned and tortured for months in a suburban home before escaping, this flick comes weighted down with great expectations.
As Westerners, we have certain demands. First, the movie takes place in 1977 in post-Perón Argentina, so we must have a history lesson to establish "context." Second, we are all liberal humanists, so this film must celebrate the unbreakable human spirit. Third, it is very bad to arrest and torture people, so we must denounce this strongly, but even torturers are people too, so we must have a well-rounded portrayal of both the jailors and the jailed.
Mr. Caetano's terse, tense film disappoints in nearly all of these departments. Instead, he offers a survival-horror scenario that would play well on a double bill with a movie like Eli Roth's grotesquely violent "Hostel." And I mean that as a compliment.
Dropped into a world governed by nightmare logic, the four central characters in "Chronicle of an Escape" are political prisoners who may or may not be militants. Stripped naked, hair chopped off, bearded, and covered in scabs, these four are identical and may as well be interchangeable. Their captors are ciphers who dispense brutality and kindness at random intervals, and the only emotions on display are fear and pain. What redeems the movie is Mr. Caetano's devotion to the prisoners' point of view and his Hitchcockian grasp of suspense. Every scene is a set piece, and he constructs each from nitroglycerine building blocks, squeezing more stomach-knotting tension out of a man boiling water than most blockbusters can wring out of an asteroid hitting Earth.
In the end, the characters do little more than survive, but this movie shows why, in that time and place, survival was an achievement worth celebrating.
