All posts by Germán Biener

Capsules, Essays

SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP

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As a lifelong fan of horror, I’d been longing to attend the Sitges Film Festival for a few years, but  for one reason or another I never had the chance. At last, with my best friend in tow, this year I jumped at the opportunity to experience the 59th edition of the festival and secured seats for five screenings. While the festival started on October 8 and ended on October 18, I spent the long weekend of October 9-12 there, coinciding with Spanish regional and national festivities.

Sitges itself is a quaint coastal town with peaceful white streets that, in line with the film festival, were decorated with skeletons or monsters. Main streets were crowded with both locals and foreigners, and posters along the street announced the festival. This year, the main focus was the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Carrie, alongside the recent rise of religious horror. A festive atmosphere hung over these streets, and T-shirts reflected a love of horror and fantasy cinema.

My friend and I stayed in a  hotel close to the three main venues premiering movies: Auditori Melià, Casino Prado Suburense, and L’Escorxador. Melià is the largest venue, L’Escorxador the smallest—it’s a former slaughterhouse, which feels appropriate for the festival. These venues are only a 10-minute walk away from each other, and you can enjoy nice views of the beach and sea on your way to Auditori Melià, and stop at stands selling merchandise, meeting points for fans, or just have a drink. There’s a street food area on a hill where food trucks sell expensive—albeit somewhat healthy—fast food, both salty and sweet.

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 Continue reading SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IRREVERSIBLE (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: , , Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon

PLOT: A reflection on the destructive nature of time, centered around a ruthless sexual abuse and a vicious revenge.

COMMENTS: First things first: I balk at calling Gaspar Noé’s classic Irreversible a “weird” movie. Experimental, brutal, shocking, or thought-provoking are all more suitable adjectives. Its “weirdest” element, apart from its anxiety-inducing quasi-infrasound and some improvised dialogue, is perhaps that the movie exists in two versions: a disorienting one where the story is told in reverse and a clearer one, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, that retains the chronological order of the events.

Another aspect worth bearing in mind is Noé’s intention to blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional. At the time of filming, leads Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, both of whom offer superb performances as young couple Alex and Marcus, were actually married As a result, their scenes together feel tender and sweet, and they are imbued with genuine love—a stark contrast to the gruesome violence pervading most of the film.

Because, despite all the stylistic experimentation, Irreversible remains grounded in disturbingly realistic ideas. In an interview, Noé bleakly revealed that the film was meant to represent the fact “that people are animals who control themselves to survive in a civilized environment, and not the other way around.” In effect, while the movie is far from being a gorefest, the atavistic behavior that characters display in some of the sequences is chilling. When the outbursts of violence take place, the viewer can’t help but stare in astonishment at the dark underbelly of human nature presented on screen. The horror of the film lies in these very actions and in the realization that they can be triggered any time under the right circumstances.

The central conflict of the movie (spoilers ahead) exemplifies such unhinged violence. It is also literally the central scene, the one that doesn’t change its location irrespective of which version of the film one watches, and the one that is hotly debated among commentators who are undecided whether it’s one of the most powerful scenes in cinema history or simply gratuitous onscreen shock value. It is a crude, ten-minute static shot depicting Belluci’s rape and beating in an underground tunnel, whose red walls become a symbol of hell. This scene constitutes the trigger for Cassel’s revenge on the perpetrator, but it also works on a level beyond the screen, the long static shot directly making us viewers witness to a cruel reality, rendering us impotent before it, just as the victim is.

The other gruesome scene of the film takes place at the beginning or end, depending on the version, at a gay bar called The Rectum (fans of psychoanalysis may find links to the above-mentioned tunnel), where the rapist, referred to as Le Tenia, is blithely clubbing and having fun with other men. Cassel and his friend burst into the bar and, Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IRREVERSIBLE (2002) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FLESH OF THE VOID (2017)

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DIRECTED BY: James Florian Quinn

FEATURING: Man Without a Face, Kmsura, Dead Flesh, Elektriking

PLOT: The last words of a man on his deathbed are followed by a nihilistic nightmare seemingly representing humanity’s greatest fears.

COMMENTS: Flesh of the Void is a low-budget, experimental horror film that bagged an award for Best Overall Feature and a few nominations—including Best Cinematography and Best Director—at the Nightmares Film Festival in 2017. The fact that its cast is mostly anonymous should raise no eyebrows, considering that the movie includes sexually explicit material and extremely violent scenes.

Shot on both Super 8 and 16mm film, James Florian Quinn employs different techniques that give his work a timeless feel, such as black-and-white photography, film grain effects, intertitles, and a creep– and sleep—inducing soundtrack. In that sense, and in its frequent religious imagery, Quinn’s creation inevitably reminds one of ’s (in)famous experimental horror film Begotten (1991), which gives viewers a similar impression of being witness to an old, taboo recording.

Flesh of the Void has no linear plot or conventional narrative, but it does have a sort of theatrical structure, since it is divided into three acts alongside a prologue, an interlude, and an epilogue. It all begins with a surprisingly lyrical and unsettling monologue whispered by a dying man offscreen (“And it all started, to my dismay, soon to set in the state of decay. What just still was will never be again, as I’m still lying in my bed, breathing my last breath”). Then, chaotic images with occasional voiceover ensue, and the viewer is presented with a parade of grainy images depicting increasingly grotesque scenes.

At first, there seems to be a preoccupation with industrial, urban landscapes and the sinister occurrences taking place therein. Afterward, however, violent situations and religious imagery feature more prominently, without any clear links between them and the aforementioned urban landscapes—this overall meaninglessness perhaps being part of the movie’s presumably nihilistic message.

Such haphazard sequences often involve explicit sexual action, and because of these the viewer may get easily sidetracked. At the risk of waxing intellectual, one may regard the combination of sexuality and suffering that the movie presents as the tension between Eros and Thanatos, that is, the two opposing forces that make up human life, with Eros standing for (pro)creation and Thanatos standing for destruction and death. Indeed, whoever decides to watch Flesh of the Void will be assailed by disturbingly brutal situations—including cannibalism and rape—interspersed with numerous masturbatory scenes, often involving the clergy. The latter scenes—which look good on paper as representations of Eros—drag on unnecessarily. They would have greatly benefited from condensing, for their meaning—or lack thereof—is equally impactful after just a glimpse. Such lengthy scenes detract from the overall disquieting atmosphere of the movie and border on the gratuitous.

Nevertheless, occasional shots are genuinely enjoyable despite the budget limitations, especially at the beginning and the end of the film. There is also some respite from cruelty, sex, and interminable onanism in the interlude (titled “Agony”), which is the most theatrical part of Flesh of the Void, with actors moving in ways reminiscent of Greek tragedy at times. This is the most eeriely intriguing and even—dare I say it—tranquil part of the movie, taking place between two acts that feature a great deal of the above-mentioned perversities.

Those who relish experimental movies that feel like inexplicable waking nightmares, no matter how low their budget, may be inclined to give Flesh of the Void a shot. Yet, I must give them a heads-up that their patience is going to be tested, and possibly not rewarded, for the movie as a whole frequently meanders. While opinions will surely differ, for me the nihilistic takeaway from Flesh of the Void seems to be that religious systems and promises of an afterlife are hollow, and we should only believe in the reality of human suffering and the void of death. Suitably for this interpretation, the black-and-white cinematography of the movie is maintained until the very end, when blood suddenly gushes in a vivid red. Cheerful stuff!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This film is not for everyone… [Quinn’s] hellishly depraved and nauseating depictions of the macabre were, in a weird way, eerily satisfying. Because when you really stop and think about it, death is no doubt the scariest thing that will ever happen to us,” Jared Letourneau, The Horror Syndicate

(This movie was nominated for review by Vlad Gligor, who called it “very similar to Begotten.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

Capsules

AMANECE, QUE NO ES POCO [DAWN BREAKS, WHICH IS NO SMALL THING] (1989)

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DIRECTED BY: José Luis Cuerda

FEATURING: Antonio Resines, José Sazatornil, Cassen, Luis Ciges

PLOT: An engineering professor returns to Spain to visit his father;  they take a trip to a remote village crowded with eccentric inhabitants where incongruous situations are the norm.

Still from AMANECE, QUE NO ES POCO (1989)

 

COMMENTS: José Luis Cuerda’s Amanece, Que No Es Poco (translated as Dawn Breaks, Which Is No Small Thing) is part of a group of Spanish films that professor and scriptwriter Jaime Bauzá identifies as “surruralismo,” a blending of surrealism and ruralism. In essence, all of these movies are absurdist comedies, which isn’t surprising considering small rural communities are often associated with traditional mindsets and tight-knit circles, and are thought to harbor suspicion of outsiders. Conversely, surrealism involves an intrusion of the weird into the ordinary, creating images that have no direct counterpart in reality. The surreal seeping into the rural therefore produces a unique dissonance.

Amanece, Que No Es Poco thrives on such incongruity. The film rejects traditional storytelling and linear narrative in favor of a sequence of vignettes featuring the inhabitants of a small village in Albacete, a Castilian province in central Spain. While there is a significant lack of plot, the motley crew of villagers and the bizarre situations they find themselves in make up for it. As Bauzá points out, there is no real protagonist in surruralismo; instead, viewers are presented with a parade of primary characters sharing a similar amount of screen time, each with their own funny circumstances. In Amanece, Que No Es Poco, some of these include men growing out of soil like plants, the village drunkard literally splitting into two personas, and a village school teacher singing and performing a lesson on different types of groins and their significance.

Such incongruous situations are not the only humorous element in the movie, but they reinforce the discordant dialogues between the colorful characters. The randomness of the lines in several scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, with changes in tone coming out of nowhere in a great display of absurdity. Cuerda makes fun of stereotypes about small towns and thwarts viewers’ expectations every few minutes. For instance, the film challenges the common perception of villagers as yokels by having them reference world literature—Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, or Góngora are mentioned, among others—and philosophy—allusions to Stoicism and dialectical materialism appear out of the blue. It’s unlikely that these references add any intellectual depth to the story itself, but their mention amidst the coarser language found throughout the movie is hilarious.

Such intellectual references give the movie a universal feel that causes yet another dissonance with its very specific rural Spanish setting. As a result, the humor of Amanece, Que No Es Poco may fall flat, especially for viewers who are not familiar with Spanish village culture. There is a sociological idea of “deep Spain” (“España profunda”) referring to areas of the country that are profoundly conservative and staunchly uphold tradition. Cuerda mocks such narrow-minded attitude and introduces signs of progress within the structures of the village, such as the acceptance of foreigners rather than the embrace of isolationism. The importance of these signs risks becoming downplayed by the overall absurdity, however.

The cast does a great job portraying the quirky villagers, and one is always agog at the next bizarre scene. Sometimes characters reappear, but then new ones are introduced, and their storylines not necessarily concluded. Special effects are also notable for the time, and earned the film two nominations for the Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars), alongside a nomination for the zanily original script.

Amanece, Que No Es Poco is a paradigmatic example of surruralismo and a by-the-book absurdist comedy. Looking for logic or deep meanings in such a movie may lead to frustration, so it’s preferable to go with the flow and be bombarded with the same nonsensical situations that the characters experience. As Wim Tigges put it in his doctoral dissertation, quoted by Neil Cornell in The Absurd in Literature (2006): “Nonsense is indeed one possible reflection of life in that it is at once both and neither meaningful and meaningless.” Nonsense in art is illogical on the surface, but at the same time follows its own logical system, requiring our innate knowledge of grammar, rhythm and tone for it to function, for us to try to recognize something hidden yet meaningful therein—otherwise, it would just be gibberish and noise, at best. In the paradoxical nature of nonsense we find an interpretation of human life in all its shades. Cuerda’s humorous and absurdist take not only reflects his thoughts on village culture, but also on the chaos of existence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One-of-a-kind Spanish surreal comedy that is so dense with gags, eccentricities, sketches, characters, fantastical absurdities and punchlines, that it is almost impossible to describe.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

I think this movie is weirder than average
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Amanece, que no es poco

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