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| Courtesy: Arrow Video |
Making its US and UK home-media debuts in a lavish two-disc Arrow Video limited edition, the 2021 Spanish indie The Sacred Spirit is a sly, unexpected film; a tragicomic satire of the alienation of modern society which is as savage as it is disconcertingly dry. It is a film that first-time viewers won't know quite what to make of until writer/director Chema García Ibarra makes his intentions clear, and this imbalance that it creates in its viewers is exactly its power. Even the fact that it has been released on Arrow Video, a label best known for distributing genre films, seems like a metatextual part of its ambiguity. Is it a genre film? Plot elements certainly suggest that it might be, and the label which released it just goes to further the audience expectations which the movie is very much aware of, and is deliberately toying with. And yet the film itself is very reluctant to tip its hand, content instead to take us on a strange journey where we know little more than the movie's hapless main character. Filled with wall-to-wall occult, new-age, and Ancient Egyptian imagery, with dialogue loaded with layers of chatter about cults, control, and how society sells our own alienation and longing for meaning back to us, and laced with moments of dark and absurd humor at times reminiscent of David Lynch (in his weird character comedy mode, not his surrealism) and Todd Solondz, The Sacred Spirit is one unusual film which plenty might find baffling and off-putting, but that a certain cult film audience will absolutely love.
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| Courtesy: Arrow Video |
In a small, working-class Spanish city a child has been abducted, and a desperate search is underway. Meanwhile the missing girl's uncle, José Manuel, is a hapless, awkward restaurant employee who was raised in a strange new-age cult, and who is now a member of an even stranger UFO cult with strong Heaven's Gate vibes. As he becomes more and more involved in the cult, he becomes convinced that he possesses secret cosmic information that could alter reality as we know it, and that he is on some kind of divine mission. The film follows him as he drifts through several days leading up to when this cosmic event is supposed to occur, and it shows us these days more or less through his eyes, as an unquestioning true-believer who genuinely thinks that his secret information is real, and it doesn't give us any further information beyond what he himself is privy to, outside of stray conversations he overhears. The result is a portrait of his particular blind need to believe, amid a landscape of alienation and cult-like bombardment, while we in the audience feel an ever-growing sense of dread that he is oblivious to - and actively enabling - something far more sinister and grounded-in-reality that is going on around him. Or is he right, and reality is going to change?
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| Courtesy: Arrow Video |
The film exists in a working-class world where no one seems quite happy, and everyone desperately needs to believe in something that makes them feel less alone, and more special. Every business we see in the film, and every home, is filled with occult, new-age, or Ancient Egyptian iconography, as though everyone is trying to fill their lives with objects that confer some sense of meaning, and businesses are trying to sell meaning, in addition to whatever kinds of goods or services they actually sell. A coffee shop that seems to actually be selling cosmic significance? Check. A realtor who actually seems to be selling cosmic significance? Check. TVs are always playing in the world of the film, and we overhear news broadcasts that routinely feature special guests from local churches, there to sell faith via newscasts. The first commercial we overhear from TV is for an occult shop, literally selling the idea of otherworldly knowledge to help people through their drab lives. But then we hear commercials for a shoe store and a law firm, and they sound equally culty, and like they are selling the same thing: shoes and legal advice as spiritual enlightenment. In The Sacred Spirit, every institution of society and capitalism is framed like a cult. Whether it is stores, media, or actual cults, everything and everyone is trying to sell meaning, and sell belonging, to everyone else, in a world that feels meaningless and where no one feels like they really belong. When people get lured in by cults in real life, we tend to judge them as being duped, or looking for meaning in the wrong place in a way that seems desperate or sad, but this film makes the case that all of us do that all the time, though the cult we subscribe to might be the cult of capitalism or the cult of seeking social acceptance, not some unhinged UFO society. But with that said, the UFO cult that José Manuel is caught up in is a particularly strange and increasingly disconcerting one, and while the film asks questions about whether anyone is really enlightened, or just duped, that question has much higher stakes where he is concerned, as his story and the story of his niece's disappearance begin to converge.
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| Courtesy: Arrow Video |
This story and its social commentary are told with a very dry, sly sense of dark humor, as the film plays out in the foreground like a slice of a very weird life, while the background is filled with little absurdities. The film is not Lynchian in sense of being surreal or dark in the common sense in which that adjective is used, but writer/director Chema García Ibarra - making his first feature, after a string of shorts that are included on disc 2 of the Arrow set - has a very similar sense of humor and strangeness to David Lynch when it comes to the odd characters with whom he fills the background of nearly every scene. Just as Lynch likes to fill the backgrounds of otherwise straight-faced scenes with odd and absurd characters (like the barbershop quartet incongruously rehearsing behind Coop while he has breakfast in Twin Peaks), Ibarra does the same here, as the funniest parts of the film are often the odd asides happening tangential to the main action, from nameless characters who we will never see again. Ibarra's camera loves to linger before or after a scene to capture some strange snippet of conversation, or some odd person doing an odd activity, that occasionally ties back to the story but usually does not, serving just to add to the bizarre tapestry that is his skewed vision of Spain.
The other filmmaker who Ibarra's strange sense of humor sometimes reminded me of is Todd Solondz, the king of uncomfortable awkwardness himself (whose films, truth be told, are really not for me, though what Ibarra does here works for me a bit better at least). A lot about this film is deliberately quite uncomfortable, as we watch José Manuel get deeper and deeper into an almost certainly bad situation, but do so as a true believer who does it all unquestioningly, with certainty that he is on some kind of divine mission. This bent towards gleefully uncomfortable cringe humor is made pretty clear in the film's opening scene, in which the young sister of the abducted girl gives a completely earnest and straight-faced Sunday-school report about abductions and human sacrifices which quickly veers into offensive territory to which the kid is oblivious, before the teacher just moves on without comment, not knowing what else to say. As with Solondz's films, this definitely is not a film that will work for everyone, but the ways in which it is alienating and off-putting are very deliberate, and is in service of the film's themes and social commentaries in a way that I thought worked well, and justified itself by the end.
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| Courtesy: Arrow Video |
The Sacred Spirit is a fascinating debut feature, and a fascinatingly bizarre film in general. The main descriptor that I keep coming back to is unexpected: unexpected in its off-kilter, dryly absurd, very dark sense of humor with underpinnings of tragedy, unexpected in the ambiguity of its possibly-genre storytelling, unexpected in the gleefully cluttered layers of its social satire and commentary. It is a deliberately alienating film that strives to keep the viewer off-balance, in a way that not everyone will be game for, but for cult film fans who are up for this type of viewing experience, it is definitely worth the trip.
Score:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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