‘mercy’
interpreters Ángela Molina, Manel Llunell, Ana Polvorosa, María León, Antonio Durán, Macarena Gómez, Daniel Freire, Songa Park, Alberto Jo Lee
Year 2022
premiere January 13, 2023
★★★★
Eduardo Casanova showed with his debut, ‘skins’that we are dealing with a rare bird in Spanish cinema. He’s a director who dares to do different things, such as construct an inalienable personal universe between the grotesque and the naive, without fear of breach, trouble, or experimentation.
It all could have ended there, in a kamikaze debut, but his second feature film confirms that no, there’s still a lot to dig into. Extremely creative and destructive head edward casanova.
‘mercy’ focuses on a single story (it has a more choral and fractional structure, unlike in ‘Skins’): the relationship between a mother and a son, and the toxicity that builds up between them to the point of becoming a pathology. HE IS (a totemic and impressive Angela Molina) is called Libertad and is named after his son Mateo (the perfect young manel llunellalmost to the point of turning his life into a prison, a suffocating and sinister field throbbing with sickness and madness.
Casanova is now tracking a deadly double pirouette, daring close to the cinema of the first Julio Medem: comparing matriarchal dictatorship to North Korean totalitarianism to talk about oppression and subjugated emotion, and the metaphor works almost miraculously because that’s how the director’s cinema is, so free and daring, and only through these two virtues are true cinematic enlightenments achieved.
‘Religiousness’ is a spooky tale, a metaphorical talebut also a tribute to the plastic fantasy in which images, colors and textures, artistic composition work together with an outstanding soundtrack. a symphony that simultaneously drags, displaces, fascinates and disturbs.