Grabbed a ticket for this knowing nothing about the director as someone who doesn’t watch a lot of music videos in general, but knew that Arca was doing the soundtrack which I thought was exciting.
I liked this one quite a bit. I can see why Harmony Korine would be interested in this project – it scratches an itch that hearkens back to the essence that defines a lot of Korine’s work. Very nihilistic and dark in its depiction of youth, in this case focusing on a group of young criminals wandering around gritty Colombian streets. There’s not any sense of a destination nor is there a goal for what they’re doing and where they’re going. There is one hell of a robbery scene here where Arca’s soundtrack really shines – just a sudden blast of noise and synths. The buildup to it, including when the robbers put on their masks reminded me a bit of Baby Invasion except if it were a found footage movie instead of a Twitch livestream and if it were way more intense and violent.
I also enjoy the way the film portrays a lot of these urban spaces as being rather liminal – there is an unsettling, eerie vibe as we watch the camera slowly traverse through these tight corridors in the dark, almost as if navigating through a never-ending maze.
During the found footage segments, the film also cuts to these interview segments involving close-ups of the faces of these characters as they discuss topics pertaining to life, their upbringing and what happiness means to them. The answers are very bleak – they don’t have role models or father figures to look up to, they’ve never experienced being loved or being cared for, and they only know the here and now without an understanding of what the future is meant to be. Life for them is a cycle of poverty and crime, further reinforced by the fact that they had to steal the very camera they were filming on in order to tell their story to begin with.
Also doesn’t overstay its welcome at a brisk 84 minutes in length. Harmony Korine fans will most certainly get a lot out of this. Also, I need that Arca soundtrack in my life right now.