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DIRECTED BY: Steve Oram
FEATURING: Steve Oram, Tom Meeten, Julian Rhind-Tutt
PLOT: In an alternative society where people behave like primates, an exiled alpha male, along with his beta companion, attempts to return home and reestablish his dominance.
COMMENTS: Is the entirety of human civilization nothing but a facade, camouflage for our authentically animalistic behavior? That’s what Steve Oram’s low-budget DIY feature debut seems to suggest. Aaaaaaah strips humans of their cultural wrappings.
Our story starts in an archaic and archetypal manner, recalling Odysseus ‘s return to Ithaca. An alpha male, exiled in a forest along with his companion/follower, attempts to find his way back home and regain his former position as the dominant male of the pack. This is a narrative of power plays in their most basic and primal form. Dialogue is absent and behavior is totally unfiltered. Wild instincts govern everyone’s actions. You can expect crude violence, with B-movie special effects, and a few disgusting segments immersed in bodily fluids and secretions. It stays focused on the main plot, for the most part, though introducing some twists later on and employing a few flashbacks in the process. Once it strays from our protagonists, following the younger of the pack’s females in a short escapade to showcase similarly barbaric social dynamics in other aspects of this society.
Oram gives special emphasis to the types of media these monkey-people consume. The media landscape portrayed in Idiocracy is sophisticated in comparison. The film mirrors our own world in a distorted way, revealing how entertainment services our lizard brains: in other words, the animals within us.
The soundtrack is comprised of accordingly simple melodic tunes, and a few more nostalgic, sensual or playful ones, creating a dissonance with the depraved segments usually accompanying them.
All in all, despite its extravagance and over-the-top moments, this movie doesn’t revel in shock value, but honestly strives to underline the way archaic instincts hide behind even the most civilized social dynamics.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Having familiarized ourselves with the area, we went to our first movie at Auditori Melià at 11pm: Joshua Giuliano’s River, starring Jany Levy and Jessica Rothe. Naturally, such iconic names and an intriguing premise—three siblings grieving over their dad’s death are stalked by a faceless killer on a river—had us hyped up in advance. Unfortunately, this first film was the greatest disappointment of our festival experience, but at least it made us hopeful that the next four movies would be an improvement! The problem lies not in the acting, which is great, as one would expect from the cast, but in the many plot holes and unexplored links. Scenes honoring previous classics can be easily detected, but River struggles to get its own story right in this mix of references, leaving viewers with many questions as to what the movie was about. It felt like it was trying to communicate something about trauma and the passing down of harmful