I am working my way back to director/writer Alejandro Amenabar’s earlier works, and “Thesis” is his feature debut. I first became aware of Amenabar with “the sea inside” and a bit later with “the others” (2004 and 2001, respectively), and have been amazed by his storytelling talent as a film maker.
Here we have a rare combination of entertainment, great writing and original thinking. Much like with Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, I now know going in that whatever film bearing his name will be interesting to say the least.
What Amenabar adds, though, is a different sensibility, a different sense of humanity to his characters, where the Nolan brothers have I think a more ‘cerebral’ approach. Really, at heart I think it’s a North-South kind of thing, which I find both fascinating and terrific.
Typically when thinking about modern Spanish language cinema I think of the three musketeers: Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
Amenabar, and Nacho Vigalondo (“Time Crimes”) may be getting less exposure perhaps, but perhaps this works in their favor.
Watch the trailer here:
I am reluctant to call “Thesis” a story: to me it’s more of a kind of journey in which the protagonists race towards a conflagration, at times getting close, forming partnerships, then breaking away in fear and suspicion, but always moving towards a final event which will not answer everything: the viewer has to figure it out.
“Thesis” introduces university student Angela (Anna Torrent), who is trying to write a thesis on violence in media and its effects.
Well, actually, Angela’s working around her own drives, as we discover right away: she ‘says’ she hates violence, but cannot help herself looking at the scene of a suicide in the subway, in which the victim was cut in half by a train. The conductor moves passengers along urging them not to look, yet Angela cuts a beeline to see.
She convinces one of her professors to retrieve a videotape from the vault where the faculty keeps “questionable” audio-visual material in order to support her thesis. Intrigued, the professor agrees and is later found dead in a viewing room, presumably from a severe asthma attack.
By sheer luck, Angela is the one who finds him, the first dead person she has seen in her young life. It is a telling scene in which Amenabar balances apprehension and desire with extreme skill for a 23 year old film maker. Angela gets the tape out of the VCR and is later confronted by another student, Chema (Fele Martinez), who suspects she knows more than she let on.
Chema’s a different kind of geek.
He has a collection of extreme cinema, from Mondo Cane style to extreme porn, stuff that goes somewhat beyond the “titillating” into the “ who the f… are you?” realm, borderline illegal, in other words.
Chema and Angela watch the mystery tape together, and realize pronto that this is a snuff film, starring a student who disappeared a couple of years before.
In the extras, Amenabar talks of someone telling him that the sounds of suffering are worse than the images.
And again, tellingly, Angela records the screams off the tape and actually goes to sleep while listening to them, even though she could scarcely look at the images. Perhaps she was psychologically “vaccinating” herself to what is coming…
There is another scene in which Amenabar displays his mastery of suspense: Chema and Angela find themselves in the dark hallway leading to the university’s vault, the only source of light coming from matches lit one after the other by Chema. To keep Angela calm, Chema tells her a story, and each time he scratches a new match, we expect something to happen.
Essentially, “thesis” is an American style of mystery, and Amenabar and co-writer Mateo Gil work some very nice twists in their narrative. Like Alex de la Iglesia’s “the Oxford murders”, “thesis” will keep you guessing until the end.
It also has a very strong cast: Anna Torrent played the main part in 1973’s “the spirit of the beehive” and in 2009’s “the haunting”, Fele Martinez was in Amenabar’s “open your eyes”, as was Eduardo Noriega (“the devil’s backbone”).
“Thesis” gets five jellybeans…
