Director Natalie Meta takes an abstract approach to her second feature film The Intruder (El Prófugo). Based on a book of the same name by C.E. Feiling, Meta walks a fine line between the psychological and the spiritual but because the film doesn’t elaborate on either view, the movie lingers in a limbo while the audience tries to get to the bottom of what’s happening without losing interest.
Ines (Érica Rivas) and her annoying boyfriend Leopoldo (Daniel Hendler) are on their way to a resort for a vacation. She’s scared of flying, so her boyfriend gives her a pill to calm herself down. Ines has some strange and violent dreams on the flight but wakes up to reality which soon slaps her in the face. While in the hotel room, Leopoldo and Ines have an argument where he constantly pressures her into revealing what she said and...
Ines (Érica Rivas) and her annoying boyfriend Leopoldo (Daniel Hendler) are on their way to a resort for a vacation. She’s scared of flying, so her boyfriend gives her a pill to calm herself down. Ines has some strange and violent dreams on the flight but wakes up to reality which soon slaps her in the face. While in the hotel room, Leopoldo and Ines have an argument where he constantly pressures her into revealing what she said and...
- 12/16/2021
- by Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
Latin America has submitted 15 contenders in the Academy Awards’ international feature category this time, not quite as big a haul as last year’s tally of 18.
Leading the hopefuls is Mexico’s “Prayers for the Stolen,” the fiction debut of Tatiana Huezo, one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2022. Her tale follows three girls as they come of age in a remote village afflicted by the drug trade and human trafficking. The Cannes Un Certain Regard winner is now streaming on Netflix, which is putting all its promotional heft behind it. The film’s producers are Jim Stark (“Coffee and Cigarettes”) and Nicolas Celis, the latter a key producer of Mexico’s first-ever international feature Oscar winner, “Roma,” by Alfonso Cuarón.
Huezo’s 2016 documentary, “Tempestad,” represented Mexico at the 90th Academy Awards. Since 1957, when Mexico started participating in the Oscars, 10 of its entries have been nominated, culminating in “Roma’s” win in 2019.
Chile,...
Leading the hopefuls is Mexico’s “Prayers for the Stolen,” the fiction debut of Tatiana Huezo, one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2022. Her tale follows three girls as they come of age in a remote village afflicted by the drug trade and human trafficking. The Cannes Un Certain Regard winner is now streaming on Netflix, which is putting all its promotional heft behind it. The film’s producers are Jim Stark (“Coffee and Cigarettes”) and Nicolas Celis, the latter a key producer of Mexico’s first-ever international feature Oscar winner, “Roma,” by Alfonso Cuarón.
Huezo’s 2016 documentary, “Tempestad,” represented Mexico at the 90th Academy Awards. Since 1957, when Mexico started participating in the Oscars, 10 of its entries have been nominated, culminating in “Roma’s” win in 2019.
Chile,...
- 12/13/2021
- by Anna Marie de la Fuente
- Variety Film + TV
There may be no better metaphor for an identity crisis than the art of the voiceover. In “The Intruder,” the haunting and sophisticated psychological thriller from Argentine director Natalia Meta, the symbolic potential is clear early on. Inés (Érica Rives) watches a schlocky, violent movie as she dubs the screams into a microphone, her hands in front of her face and her eyes wide with embellished fear. As Inés hovers between her daily routine and the fictional worlds where she lends her voice, her reality grows more tenuous, as .
Channeling the psychological thrills of performance in “Black Swan” with a spooky audiovisual tapestry similar to Peter Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio,” Meta develops Inés’ conundrum through the accumulation of disturbing dreams that invade her everyday existence. Inés’ saga begins on a tropical vacation with her new lover Leopardo (Daniel Hendler), a romantic cheeseball who grows jealous when he overhears her muttering in her sleep.
Channeling the psychological thrills of performance in “Black Swan” with a spooky audiovisual tapestry similar to Peter Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio,” Meta develops Inés’ conundrum through the accumulation of disturbing dreams that invade her everyday existence. Inés’ saga begins on a tropical vacation with her new lover Leopardo (Daniel Hendler), a romantic cheeseball who grows jealous when he overhears her muttering in her sleep.
- 2/22/2020
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Take two parts De Palma, one part Zulawski, four parts “Berberian Sound Studio” and dissolve the whole in about a million parts water, and the resultant dilute solution might approximate “The Intruder,” an oddly flavorless supernatural psycho-thriller from sophomore Argentinian director Natalia Meta. The claustrophobically close-up tale of a woman’s mental unraveling in the wake of a traumatic incident, the film is an adaptation of regional cult favorite “El mal menor” (literally “The Lesser Evil”) by C.E. Feiling, which is evidently a horror-tinged riff on gender and sexual identity. As such, it comes to a stalwart but perhaps rather respectable Berlin competition lineup promising a welcome blast of genre-inflected chaotic-evil energy.
But Meta chooses not to fully embrace the story’s lurid potential. In the flat light of Dp Barbara Alvarez’s strangely prosaic photography, this relatively straightforward assembly of unusual ingredients — mysterious pipe-organ tuners, terrible boyfriends, anti-mothers, sonic...
But Meta chooses not to fully embrace the story’s lurid potential. In the flat light of Dp Barbara Alvarez’s strangely prosaic photography, this relatively straightforward assembly of unusual ingredients — mysterious pipe-organ tuners, terrible boyfriends, anti-mothers, sonic...
- 2/21/2020
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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