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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
The second feature film of Álava born Spanish writer-director
Juanma Bajo Ulloa La madre muerta or The Dead Mother depending on
the translation is an explosive serial-killer led dark comedy echoing the works
of the Coen Brothers ala Blood Simple, Fargo or No Country for
Old Men. A picture filled with
explosive scenes of brutally violent murder interspersed with a unique blend of
black humor keeping the audience from abandoning ship entirely, the film went
on to become a festival awards season favorite including winning the Best
Director award at the Montreal Film Festival and Best Special Effects at the 8th
Goya Awards ceremony. And yet despite
the enormous accolades, the film never once saw a United States release. That is until the good folks at new boutique
releasing label Radiance Films sought to right that wrong with a new limited-edition
rerelease of the film on a 4K restored blu-ray disc and plentiful extras
including making-of footage and one of the director’s early short films.
Years after Ismael (Karra Elejalde) burglarizes the home of
a fine art restorer and murders the homeowner which leaves her child Leire
traumatized and mute. Years later
working in a seedy bar, Ismael spots the orphaned girl Leire (Ana Álvarez)
again and in a fit of paranoia and egomaniacal rage, he savagely kills the
manager with a beer tap and proceeds to kidnap Leire and hold her hostage for
ransom from the local mental hospital she was abducted from. Living with his partner in crime Maite (Portuguese
singer Lio) in a drab apartment trying to cover up their blood laden tracks, Ismael
grows more obsessed with the girl whose life he destroyed and tries
unsuccessfully to make her laugh. Soon
the jealousies of Maite are stirred and she tries to kill Leire at one point
but not before one of the nurses from the hospital ventures into dangerous
territory to look for her.
Vicious, shocking, transgressive, taboo and at times
touchingly hilarious, The Dead Mother is one of the best examples of the
new wave of Spanish cinema not directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu or Alfonso
Cuarón. Explosive and thorny out of the
gate including some unforgettable, hard-to-unsee sequences aided by fine,
daring performances from all the key players, its fair to say The Dead
Mother might be ahead of its time.
In other words, perhaps too shocking for American consumers. Touching on uncomfortable sexual taboos as Ismael
turns up the head on his perverse infatuation with his mute hostage caused by
years of unresolved childhood trauma, the film posits you with a complete
monster for a majority of the running time as his behavior gradually gets more
and more lascivious.
One of the key elements in why the picture works so well is
the panoramic widescreen cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe. From start to finish, the film is expertly
composed with a kind of technical precision that’s striking even as the camera
looms over unspeakable atrocities. The
orchestral score by Bingen Mendizábal is equally effective in trying to express
the confused emotional states of the central bloodless monster carrying the
film. Karra Elejalde is tasked with
going to some rather dark places, but you can also feel the actor going into
clown mode with a striking scene used on the sleeve art of the killer Ismael
trying to make Leire smile or laugh. Lio
as the increasingly jealous partner-in-crime represents another lost killer in
over her head unable to stop the crimes of her aloof and conceited murdering
mate. Also strong is Ana Álvarez who is
tasked with portraying crippling mental illness whose foggy stupor is only
awakened by the sight and smell of blood from all those horrifying years ago.
A low key masterwork of Spanish genre cinema with more than
a few scenes that expertly creep under the skin, this is hard, uncompromising
character study driven filmmaking that still has the capacity to offend and
engender walkouts or shutoffs but for the initiated represents a class A work
of dramatic fiction. Brilliantly
photographed, scored, edited and acted, it is a daring exercise in character
driven storytelling where we sit forward in our seat caught up in the suspense
of the situation while being appalled by the actions of our main
character. One of the most surprising,
intelligent and perceptive serial-killer films ever made, the Radiance Films
blu-ray more than does justice to this never-before-seen gem whose vitality as
well as volatility doesn’t seem to age with time. The kind of film that’s difficult to finance
let alone release in the United States, The Dead Mother remains as boldly
brutal today as it did when unsuspecting moviegoers first saw it in 1993.
--Andrew Kotwicki
