As his most technically accomplished Mexican-period movie, and almost a mainstream one, this film can be an enjoyable first introduction into Buñuel's obsessions: the same ones that ruled the surrealistic movement. The underground psychological streams in the mind are finely expressed in this story of a pathological jealous and his victim. In his Mexican exile, Buñuel was forced to make "nourishing movies", that were the most conventional ones in his filmography, but he managed to smuggle his surrealistic ideals into all of them (even he could make the absolutely surrealistic "The Exterminating Angel").
Based on an autobiographic novel by Spanish fellow countrywoman Mercedes Pinto, this film is the vehicle for displaying many marvelous surreal moments. It can also be viewed as a brilliant clinical recreation of paranoid distress, but Buñuel recognized that the protagonist, Francisco Galván, although insane, had many of his own obsessions: his view of love as an absolute imperative, the violent impulses, the fetishism for female feet
The story shifts from one point of view to another, which is the only way to understand the "two stories" in psychotic disorders.
Part of the story and many of the ideas were used later by Hitchcock for his masterpiece "Vertigo (From among the dead)". It is difficult to say plagiarism when talking about cinema, but this would be one occasion for it. It is not coincidence that both directors share a taste for the expressive properties of objects (not only as Macguffin); as two reluctantly catholic directors, objects usually act as "sacraments" for their narrative. In "El" the church and its symbols are the background for the repression and the blooming of instincts; other Buñuel's stories may be more connected with religion than this one, but "El" shows a life absolutely permeated by the relationship of primary impulses ("eros" and "thanatos") with spiritual transcend ency. With churches as the setting of the key moments of the story (desire, love encounter, the urge for murder, disappointment), church is at the beginning and the ending of this story narrated by the man who said "Thank God, I'm an atheist".
Although was filmed in three weeks, in the midst of the limitations of Mexican film industry, the movie is close to perfection in formal terms. In contrast with his previous movies, in which a still camera was predominant, in this one the camera movements are constant. The performances and the choice of cast is the most accurate of the Buñuel's Mexican-period.
