In short: Scherzo Diabolico (2015)

aka Evil Games

Warning: I’ll have to include some rather large spoilers

On first sight, Aram (Francisco Barreiro) seems to be a kind of high-functioning, well adapted coward: he’s the sort of guy who is the first in the office and the last one to leave, too timid to ask for a raise and accepting the fact that his boss reaps the harvest of his own work. At home, he finds himself berated by his wife in a loveless marriage. The rest of his private life isn’t much happier either.

However, Aram actually has come up with a way to change his fate; he has been planning to kidnap a female teenager (Daniela Soto Vell) for some time now, and the film will indeed see him go through with this plan, and reap the particular rewards that come with the identity of the girl, revealing that he’s not just a kidnapper but also a total asshole in the process. Of course, things will still not work out as he had hoped in the end, and things will escalate violently.

After a directing stint in the USA, the always interesting Adrián García Bogliano’s latest film was made in Mexico again. It’s obviously a low budget affair but no backyard filmmaking, a state of affair the director clearly knows how to work with. Unlike his last couple of films, Scherzo Diabolico doesn’t have any supernatural elements but lives rather more on the thriller side of the horror genre, interpreting it as a close relation to the conte cruel. Cruelty really becomes the film’s watchword after it has gone through a couple of twist, with the last twenty minutes or so working out badly for everyone involved in the plot, the guilty as well as the (more or less) innocent. In fact, one of the film’s biggest twists to me was how merciless it becomes in the end. The first revelations about Aram’s true nature come as a shock because the film – and Barreiro’s performance – convince the viewer of his basic humanity and seem to establish him as your typical movie loser who develops a misguided plan to go over to the winning side, which then turns out to be a much too friendly interpretation of the man.


However, Bogliano then doesn’t give his audience the out to be able to simply enjoy seeing Aram suffer for his sins but portrays the vengeance of his victim as just as unlikeable, seeing how not just he but quite a few innocents suffer a terrible fate only because they just happen to be his loved ones, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s not a pleasant view of the world for sure, and not exactly enjoyable to watch, but I do find it pretty admirable how consciously and effectively Bogliano twists the viewer’s genre expectations in ways that can’t help but make one think why and how one morally approves enough of violent acts in a movie to enjoy them, and when the joke stops being funny. Reaching this point in a film that isn’t even particularly gory for a low budget horror film makes the whole thing even more effective.