Cecilia (Elisa Carricajo), is a middle-class, divorced university professor of social sciences, who lives with a small school-age son in a suburban home. On a stormy night, an incident that occurs at the door of her house (see semispoiler below, which is even in the newsletter) and the decision she makes about it has tragic consequences and alters her orderly life.
Based on the incident and its aftermath, the film delves into the thriller genre and even psychological horror. Cecilia's house (something like her conscience), assaulted by her guilt, becomes for her an insecure and threatening place. The incident marks, on the one hand, the irruption of the real, of the concrete, in its progressive theoretical and political universe (with a patent question of class) and calls it into question. On the other hand, guilt and fear allow the irrational to enter its until then secure rational fortress. In that sense, it is remarkable how, for the most part, her faculty will continue to be a kind of comfort zone for her. It is also interesting to see how he prepares his classes, with the comparison between his bibliographic sources and the development of one of them, perhaps a sample of his lack of appropriation of the theory and a warning of what is to come, in a subtle finding of the movie.
But Francisco Márquez's film (very well treated by critics), filmed in an almost square screen format, for me is not quite right with the painting of that process of mental and intellectual collapse, since it suffers from a late payment that attentive against the climates that it intends to build and falls into a kind of repetitive loop of episodes, which, although they mark an impotence of the character, do not accumulate tension, ending up generating a certain boredom and impatience for the outcome at the expense of interest in the development of the plot .
Elisa Carricajo is very good in her lonely character (with an absolute protagonism and precisely with many scenes alone) but at some point she contributes to the feeling of bog down that the film produces.
In short, a reflection on the path of the psychological thriller on the guilty tension that is generated in a certain intellectual and political progress (represented by a university professor) between theory and practice and commitment when the real tragically erupts.
On display at the 35th Mar del Plata International Film Festival.
