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.

The story primarily revolves around a toxic love triangle that would be right at home in a soap opera if it weren't for all the tentacle sex.

The melodrama is a slow burn, but nothing I would call art house. The tension between the characters is nicely expressed through effective performances and a moody atmosphere.

The monster element is alluded to quickly, but takes it's time to fully materialize, keeping things subtle enough for some low key creepiness, but certainly wouldn't wet the appetite of anyone expecting a full blown creature feature.

It's a rather original premise, albeit a popular hentai theme, I'm not sure it's ever been presented as this kind of serious metaphor. Though the allegory may be thin, there's still some depth to try piece together.

One thing I can't help but mention is that the first leg of the film seems needlessly confusing as the two lead actresses look somewhat similar and the movie doesn't go out of it's way to make it clear that they are different characters. Maybe it's on me for skim reading subtitles and glazing over names, but I can't help but be curious if I'm the only one who had to pause and go "wtf, why is she hitting on her brother?"

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.

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.

The Untamed wasn't terrible. It's a science-fantasy or space opera story: an alien falls to Earth and radiates sexual satisfaction, affecting man, woman, and beast. I generally like this type of story, and it was well acted for the most part, with good production values.

But the plot seemed to drag quite often. I think the reason is, we don't get much communication from the women or the man most directly affected: How is penetration of multiple orifices by this non-verbal, non-human, definitely not cuddly beast superior to or substantially different from penetration (presumably of multiple orifices) by those folks' not-very-verbal, not very communicative, not-sticking-around-to-cuddle human partners? This is not at all clear. Neither is it clear how some people were injured, nor why, knowing the risks, some people continued to rendezvous with the alien.

Normally we would say, "Show, don't tell." But doing that would have turned the film into pure porn. Okay, why not tell us, using the usual stratagem of one character sharing their experience and their feelings with another character, so we get to overhear it? We see how the situation creates peripheral, real-word problems for the characters, but that just wasn't enough - for me - to build empathy. It left me cold, and the rather cavalier, nonchalant attitude expressed in the final scenes did nothing to build any redeeming affection for the characters.

It's okay, but the writers and director let us down, because it could have been a lot better.