Maritime monsters and melancholic murderers drift through Pablo Hernando’s stylish entry to TIFF Romania’s Full Moon section
What if the Great Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmos were not some ancient evil, but misunderstood? Basically friendly creatures who just looked fishy (in every sense)? And they could give humans strange powers which said humans in turn might use to become contract killers, like the taciturn protagonist (Ingrid García Johnson) in the ruthless, crime-infested world of Pablo Hernando’s noir horror. And they would hug their humans and heal them with weird oozing liquid? This is basically the cinematic concept of the Spanish director-writer’s fourth feature. It’s a saturnine, stylish genre piece, but also exhaustingly smug and slick as the oily skin of its mysterious maritime monsters.
With tentacled kraken faces and giant elephantine bodies, these beings are obviously inspired by Cthulhu. Like Lovecraft’s ancient abominations, they inhabit a parallel world that looks like a mix of moon landscape and underwater realm. They have been in contact with Earth’s cultures for ages, receiving human sacrifices (but again, don’t blame the sea creatures, maybe they never asked for these), and occasionally extending their octopus arms to human beings. Why and with what intentions is never clear. Hernando’s himself seems to never fully understand his admittedly ambitious amalgam of Lovecraftian lore and crime saga. With all its stereotypes the latter serves almost as an involuntary structural counter piece to the horror narrative.
Ingrid’s superhuman abilities, which she received as a child from the sea beings, allow her to disappear without a trace from crime scenes. While Garcia Johnson’s performance is occasionally enigmatic, a lack of character development makes her more of a female foil for well-worn genre tropes. Her swimming cap-like head cover and dark rain coat give her a jellyfish-like, amorphous silhouette. She hardly speaks and is either isolated or fiercely individualistic in both her work and life. That detachment ends an uneasy cooperation with aging crime boss Melville (a routine performance by veteran actor Ramón Barea). The contraband trafficker’s name is a double reference to Jean-Pierre Melville and Herman Melville.
The first is the director of the seminal French noir Le Samouraï, starring Alain Delon as a silent contract killer, much like Ingrid. The second is the author of the quintessential whale novel Moby Dick. Because in Hernando’s mind, there can never be too much symbolism and references, Ingrid’s father was also a whaler. Melville replaces this apparently deceased father figure with a paternal protectiveness that always retains a vague threat. In addition, he is tasked with procuring an ominous artifact connected to the mythological maritime monsters for a dying businessman – one can only speculate this almost unseen figure hopes to regain new health or even eternal life.
Another side plot involving Ingrid’s deadly talent and a former friend turned enemy of Melville almost shifts the narrative focus completely from her to the jaded crime boss. Hernando’s belated attempts to amend his own story’s unevenness leads to a lot of loose ends. But this is a film that gets its curious attraction from cinematographer Sara Gallego’s gorgeously phantasmagoric images, drenched in shiny blacks, grays, and oscillating dark blues. A somber soundscape by Andrea Sáenz Pereiro, with music by Izaskun González, evokes an aura of unspoken sadness and doom. The aestheticized horror lies in the unknown and the unconscious, for which the submarine specters provide a fitting analogy.
It’s a flawed but fascinating exercise in style and suggestion over substance which, like its monsters, is most disturbing when it remains undefined.
- OT: Una Ballena
- Director:
- Year: 2024
