‘Subsuelo’, another magnificent film by Fernando Franco about human desolation | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Emotional emptiness can be even worse than pain or cruelty. Do not express, do not feel, do not suffer, do not enjoy. Coldness as a counterpoint to any type of affliction. In Fernando Franco’s cinema, creatures are rarely shown. They do things just because; usually the most terrible. They are rigorous films of people who drown others while drowning themselves. And he rarely shows it. After The wound (2013), to die (2017) y The Rite of Spring (2022), terrifying, overwhelming and unhealthy, although with nuances of delicacy, the director hits rock bottom in his expression of the human condition with Subsoil. Another film to slit your wrists, another magnificent film.

From its formidable opening sequence shot, 12 minutes of restlessness, adolescent self-destruction and elliptical language, Subsoil unfolds like a family nightmare that hides a thriller psychological. A drama about the consequences of a carelessness that, in reality, covers the characters’ past as much or more than the future. A story of repulsion and jealousy, of psychopathy and loss, that will cause greater sting (of the good kind) the less one knows about its story. Above all, because its unique modes of narration, the work of Franco himself and Begoña Arostegui, who adapt a novel by the Argentine Marcelo Luján, turn into stimulating forms of suspense issues that conventional scriptwriters would dispatch in the opening minutes: who are the main characters; how they connect with each other; and what happened after the fateful moment. A style between the elliptical, the raw, the natural and the elusive, which perhaps only lacks a rounder ending. A closed ending that, in any case, gives the impression of not being the main objective of its creators.

The family farm where a good part of the film takes place (“The plot”, they call it; a beautiful house with a pool in the middle of the countryside), the comings and goings of the characters through rooms and gardens and, even more, the frighteningly manipulative character of one of the characters, return our gaze to Theorem, of Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his laconicism, his degradation and his ambiguity. However, even though it is deeply authentic, the trio of names that Franco ends up connecting with in different tonal and narrative spaces of Subsoil It is made up of the following group: Michael Haneke’s dryness; the talent of the Atom Egoyan of the nineties to stretch the absence of information, thus creating unease in the viewer with his particular formula; and Carlos Vermut’s malevolent ability to enter the ruin of the coldest desire.

Santiago Racaj, Franco’s regular photographer, this time replaces the grayish and beige tones, and the short depth of field of his previous works, with a luminous and brilliant image, with a disturbing summer elegance that contrasts with the blackened soul of the protagonists. Meanwhile, the anguishing use of diegetic music (which plays from within) in two horrifying moments, the rigorous shots elongated in time, and the perfect performances (from the debutants and the established ones) complete a fascinating film. A work that, paradoxically, and despite its volcanic themes, is much more whispered than shouted. The whisper of emotional emptiness that degenerates into the sinister. And without any explanation.