Original title: Espíritu sagrado
This sort-of arthouse dramedy with certain genre connections by Chema García Ibarra is one of those sad cases of a movie much praised by most every critic writing about it that does nothing whatsoever for me even though I do understand and see the artistry it is lauded for. Alas, it’s artistry in service of nothing I personally have any interest in.
That’s because Ibarra is all about techniques I usually – and specifically here – just can’t stand in a movie: consciously static visual language that’s supposed to distance the viewer from the characters and their world, where I see immersion into a world (even an unpleasant world) as one of the goals of cinema. The cold, emotional distance the film keeps to its character and their inner worlds, where I really want to understand their emotions and inner lives, perhaps even feel for them/with them or against them instead of just looking at them from the outside like a tourist without a guidebook. The monotonous delivery of every single line of dialogue, often described as naturalism by certain critics, even though it is no such thing for anyone not exclusively talking to robots, but rather what happens when you take amateur actors without experience and don’t show them how to emote on camera, another distancing technique I particularly loathe. Add to this humour so deadpan you probably need to be dead to laugh about it, and you can count me out, however interesting some of Ibarra’s ideas are on paper.
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