The impish Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva returns with a sharp thriller about an influencer who turns detective after a filmmaker he's involved with goes missing.
It’s been too long since the Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva has been in our midst, and he returns with a palm-sweating satirical comedy in which the most heinous, grotesque social media celebrity you could ever imagine (gay YouTuber and short filmmaker Jordan Firstman, playing a self-mocking version of himself) is not only salvaged, but positively deified.
Despite its succession of pitch-black plot machinations covering artistic rot, moral rot, civic rot and familial rot, Silva ends on a moment of transcendent hope, suggesting that even the most self-involved person in the world can, with ample struggle, have their head prized from between their ass cheeks.
Sliva plays a filmmaker who takes his anger out on his mutt and his cleaner Vero (Catalina Saavedra, star of the director’s more slick 2007 breakthrough, The Maid). A chance meeting with Firstman while hesitantly cruising on a gay beach retreat sees him railroaded into collaborating with this wildly irritating and self-confident media node.
And when HBO turns down all his A-material, he’s forced to roll out the Firstman project which… they love. And at that point the film takes a mad and brilliant turn, shifting away from Silva and towards Firstman as he is forced to deal with a dark situation in his own inimitable, slightly clueless, but eventually admirably dogged way. It’s a film which sets up a lot of easy targets, but shifts its aim at the last second to take on – and bullseye – a whole lot of hard ones.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 14 Sep 2023
We’ve seen nothing from Silva since pre-Covid. Is this his big return?
Takes a little time to get going, but a bold and brilliant twist takes this to a higher plateau of intelligence.
Very sharp, and Firstman is bang-on as the social celeb who comes good.
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