The Untamed

This film is about finding pleasure. The five main characters are husband, wife, brother, girl and alien. There are lies, sex, orgasmic encounters and jealousy. Good setup for a strange sci-fi drama.

This isn't a bad film. It is slowly paced but my curiosity helped it hold my attention. I sometimes find it hard for me to gauge foreign actors but I thought the acting was ok. There's an ominous feel to this and I guess that also helped in holding my attention. It wasn't anything I would classify as horror going on. It felt much more like weirdness. My biggest issue is that you never really get an understanding of everything was going on. I wanted to know why people were hurt or dying and I never got an answer. Things just didn't completely add up by the end of the film so I had to take some points away for that. With such a slow pace there was a great building of suspense but it failed to satisfy. If you can handle the pace and the unanswered questions, this is an ok movie.

A elderly couple house a strange creature from space in their barn. This creature provides great sexual pleasure and indeed brings hidden desires for instant gratification to the surface. However, the creature is also capable of destroying. In the forefront of the story though is a decaying marriage where the wife seeks a better life and a decent sex life, as her husband is bored, abusive and having a failing relationship with his brother in law.

Very odd mixture of horror / sci-fi and domestic drama in that whilst the performances and the tone are well enough handled, the sci-fi and the domestic drama don't always compliment each other successfully, such that the switch from one to the other is frequently uncomfortable and unfulfilling story wise. Very much more domestic drama than Sci-fi, by the end you can't help wondering if a bit more exploitative horror might not have helped.

Be warned that this Mexican horror film has some graphic nudity and alien/human sexuality. This is not a giveaway as the opening scene makes quite clear where this is headed. A young woman, Veronica, is in a room in a moment of what seems to be self induced pleasure, when, something not of this earth exits her most private of parts. We are off to the races. Veronica is injured during the encounter and meets a nurse at the hospital who befriends her. His sister Alejandra is in an abusive marriage and has two kids. Veronica informs Ale of meeting someone(ha ha, E.T.) who has changed her life for the better. It seems that she has become a matchmaker for the slithering creature from outer space. What follows is some extremely unpleasant human/alien couplings not for those with weak stomachs. In the end I was entertained by this Mexican thriller.

Okay, let's get one thing out of the way; the majority of this film is a character study/family drama. There are long stretches of the movie where the characters just go about their daily lives, and although it does not detract from the overall package, it does offer a better label of the films genre. Yes, there are sci-fi elements, but at its core, it is a movie about a woman's crumbling marriage, and how she deals with it.

With that said, this movie offers some excellent acting, some truly amazing and breath taking cinematography, and a great (yet subdued) soundtrack. The director also did an amazing job in framing each shot, and the movie just looks gorgeous. Hollywood could certainly learn a thing or two from these types of directors that focus on artistry over budget.

The star of the show, the Thing in the shed, was one of the freakiest things I have ever seen in any movie. It moved with purpose and grace, and the face had such a deadly intelligence as to suggest that it was smarter that the beings it was indulging. Every time it showed up on screen, I got goose bumps. Like watching the creature from The Thing mate with an Octopus. Weird, fantastical, and completely convincing. How something so genuinely creepy was created on such a small budget, I will never understand.

Overall, this is an art house drama about a woman's quiet struggles with a deteriorating marriage. Yes, there are some horrific scenes, some violence, some sex and of course, the Sci-Fi elements. But in the end, its a tale of how one woman sought solace from a failed marriage from something that was beyond her control. Highly recommended, but only if you are patient and have an appreciation of film as an art form.

There is a nod to director, Zulawski in the closing credits of this film and no wonder. What is surprising is that I have never quite got round to seeing Possession, the evening for indulging in the spectacle of Isabelle Adjani engaged (in reality or not) with a many tentacled creature, has never quite come around, and then I fall into this. 'Disgusting', 'unnecessary', 'science-fi' 'entrancing', and 'disturbing yet beautiful', various parties have cried but only the last two can I possibly concur with. The difficult roles are well played, including two young children, and although the film is peppered with graphic sex and violence, it is that element of doom that worries the most. For such a vivid film, including much that is most alluring, there is clearly established the threat of something terrible in the woods and more specifically, the cabin in the woods. Appalling, amazing, affecting and surprisingly survives explicit revelations concerning the being when might have expected that less might be more.