Mur­der Me, Monster

Appre­ci­a­tors of Amat Escalante’s The Untamed and Car­los Rey­gadas’ Post Tene­bras Lux – Latin Amer­i­can social dra­mas that toy with hor­ror to vary­ing degrees – may find a new work to admire in Mur­der Me, Mon­ster from writer/​director Ale­jan­dro Fadel. It’s a Span­ish-lan­guage inter­na­tion­al co-pro­duc­tion set around the Andes Moun­tains, and fea­tures a sim­i­lar fusion of libid­i­nal imagery and arguably Love­craft­ian ter­ror to that of Escalante’s film, in particular.

Fadel estab­lish­es his film’s body hor­ror bona fides upfront in the gris­ly open­ing scene, as a woman stum­bles through a flock of sheep and falls to her knees as she tries to keep her head and neck in place in light of a deep slice. Heard off­screen is mon­strous breath­ing of unknown ori­gin, pre­sum­ably the cul­prit. The rest of the open­ing sequence sees police offi­cers for the rur­al area arrive that night, find­ing the now head­less woman’s sav­aged remains and inter­view­ing her half-blind partner.

Offi­cer Cruz (Vic­tor Lopez, in his debut film role and with a voice like he’s gar­gling rocks at all times) is assigned to the case and locates a pri­ma­ry sus­pect: the appar­ent­ly men­tal­ly dis­turbed David (Este­ban Bigliar­di), who hap­pens to be mar­ried to Cruz’s lover, Fran­cis­ca (Tania Casciani).

David attrib­ut­es the crime to a ​“mon­ster” that is using cer­tain phras­es to com­mu­ni­cate with him tele­path­i­cal­ly, includ­ing the mantra of the film’s title. But as many more women turn up decap­i­tat­ed in the coun­try­side, and with the ram­page hit­ting close to home, Cruz is drawn to David’s ratio­nale and a strange the­o­ry about the crimes that also con­cern geo­met­ric land­scapes and the seem­ing­ly rit­u­al­is­tic appear­ance of a gang of motor­cy­clists in the mountains.

The motor­bike motif, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the rid­ers are bathed in red light at one point, brings to mind Panos Cos­matos’ recent Nico­las Cage odd­i­ty Mandy. Though on a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent mood reg­is­ter, Mur­der Me, Mon­ster goes sim­i­lar­ly bat­shit in its third act. Fadel plays his hand very ear­ly on with on-screen visu­als con­firm­ing some sort of mon­ster does lit­er­al­ly exist in this film’s world, teas­ing a weaponised tail wrap­ping round a victim’s throat and keep­ing the full crea­ture hid­den in the shad­ows. But the exact nature of its exis­tence remains slip­pery through­out the rest, as ele­ments of appar­ent pos­ses­sion come into play or, per­haps, infec­tion via some evil spir­it in the air.

This is a poten­tial­ly reduc­tive point of com­par­i­son, and con­cerns com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed film­mak­ing nations to those that pro­duced the movie, but the two recent films Mur­der Me, Mon­ster most resem­bles – as though the pair’s respec­tive atmos­pheres and plot­ting were mixed in a blender to sur­pris­ing­ly com­pat­i­ble results – are Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s large­ly noc­tur­nal rur­al body hunt mys­tery Once Upon a Time in Ana­to­lia and Na Hong-jin’s The Wail­ing, a Kore­an hor­ror in which a mul­ti­ple homi­cide leads to a vari­ety of almost primeval ter­rors being unleashed on a town.

But while the tonal gym­nas­tics are com­pelling, what sticks in the mind most is Fadel’s mon­ster when it’s final­ly revealed in full; a tri­umph of (most­ly) prac­ti­cal effects that looks like the off­spring of a Doc­tor Who crea­ture of the week and the xenomorph from Alien.