“siege”
Director: Miguel Angel Vivas
Cast: Natalia de Molina, Bella Agossou and Francisco Reyes
Punctuation: * *
Premiere: 5/5/23
Inside ‘abducted’ (2010), his best film Miguel Ángel Vivas, clarified three things that are more or less included in his filmography and that once again gain weight in ‘Siege’. The first is a commitment to the strongest genre cinema. Another is the ability to capture and represents fear and violence in enclosed spaces: The chalet in ‘Kidnapped’ or the building seized by the riot police in ‘Siege’, where they turn an old and dilapidated block into a mousetrap and pass through it nervously and skillfully. Third, it’s an obvious effort to ensure that the characters (and actresses and actors) in his movies aren’t just motion engines.
Manuela Vellés was great in ‘Kidnapped’ and Natalia de Molina was in ‘Siege’, where he carries all the weight (physical and psychological) on his back. It’s all in this movie. However, despite Vivas’s pulse, he misses in ‘Siege’ a more personal visual calligraphy. This is one of its weak points. The other is a constant rupture of the reasonable. It is true, already in the preface, hallucinatory tone Your proposal But still a movie that is totally dependent on reality (police corruption, evictions, immigration) and the way he treats these questions with the codes of the genre doesn’t always work—because it’s exaggerated because it’s illogical—and credibility breaks even when there’s an overt desire for hallucinatory narrative.