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Föreningen Film i Malmö presents
THE UNTAMED
Amat Escalante
2016, 98´
A couple in a troubled marriage locate a meteorite, initiating an encounter with a mysterious creature. Their lives are turned upside down by the discovery of the creature, which is a source of both pleasure and destruction.
Thick with a heady fog of lustful yearning, Amat Escalante’s The Untamed probes humanity’s collective fears and hypocrisies around sex while preserving the fundamental strangeness of the libido, the way it ruptures our naïvely constructed notions of righteousness and decency even as it’s routinely suppressed by them. Beneath the thin patina of civilization lies the boiling cauldron of carnality, which, in Escalante’s lunatic vision, is physically embodied by a monstrous, phallus-tentacled alien life form that gives some people untold sexual gratification and causes unspeakable violence to others.
We first glimpse the alien in the film’s startling opening sequence, which shows a meteorite lurching through space, a woman being pleasured by a tentacle, and the woman, bleeding from a gash on her side, limping through a thick mist to her motorcycle. These images teem with an ominous portent that lingers throughout The Untamed, even as Escalante shifts his focus away from the mysterious extraterrestrial and toward a social-realist melodrama centering on the densely interlocking relationships of his main characters.
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