Rating: C+
Dir: Matías Xavier Rispau
Star: Magui Bravi, Matías Desiderio, Alejandro Fiore, Inés Palombo
This gets off to a bit of a rough start. It begins with a violent raid on a drug lab, led by Doc (Desiderio). Roll credits. But we then get a far too long sequence of Sofia (Brava) running. In slow-motion. I get that she’s a pro athlete, who suffered a career-ending injury. But the race in which she’s taking part just goes on and on, to the point it seems like The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish. The equally extended sex scene between Doc and Sofia which follows almost immediately, does nothing to dissuade me from that conclusion. At this point, I wondered if I was watching the wrong film. Fortunately, it’s almost all uphill from here.
In order to fund surgery with the aim of restarting her sports career, Sofia agrees to act as a mule for Doc. She and the more experienced courier Luz (Palombo) swallow packets of the drugs which Doc “liberated” and fly to Buenos Aires, where they are supposed to deliver them to the recipient. They never make it there. Instead, they get pulled over by a pair of corrupt cops, who divert the young women to a warehouse and begin interrogating them. It doesn’t help that the packaging in which the drugs were wrapped seems to have a limited lifespan when exposed to stomach acid. Oh, yeah: and this isn’t your everyday, garden variety Colombian marching powder either. It comes with side effects beyond a runny nose.
That’s where the body horror elements kick in, and what had seemed a rather pedestrian thriller finds its stride – to use another running metaphor. One of the cops is the first to experience this, becoming convinced there is something crawling under the skin of his arm (top). The method by which he addresses this is highly memorable, being executed with a very well-staged combination of effects and acting – both from him and partner in crime, who reacts to what’s unfolding. Things are complicated further by the arrival of Doc, who presumably took a parallel flight to Argentina, and is keen to ensure his ill-gotten gains do not become someone else’s ill-gotten gains. But I’m not sure even Doc quite realizes what he is getting into.
I was expecting Sofia’s athletic talents to be more significant than it actually is. Despite the poster, she does only a moderate amount of running, commensurate with the unpleasant circumstances in which she finds herself. But this is a film where, when it ended, I genuinely wanted to see what would happen next. It finishes in a rather ambivalent matter, hinting at various possibilities, most of them rather troubling. The movie would have been significantly improved if they’d excised earlier events – we don’t really care about Sofia’s sex-life, how she met Doc, or her Olympic aspirations – and used the time instead, to expand on and broaden out these body horror elements.
[The film is out now from 4Digital Media, on streaming platforms in the US and UK]