The Untamed

All good sci­ence-fic­tion uses a fan­tas­ti­cal con­cept to say some­thing mean­ing­ful about more earth­ly mat­ters. With The Untamed, direc­tor Amat Escalante has duly fused ele­ments of social-real­ist dra­ma with extra-ter­res­tri­al erot­i­ca. The result is not mere­ly an exer­cise in grotesque body hor­ror, but a study of human sex­u­al desire, and how suc­cumb­ing to inter­nal long­ings can be both lib­er­at­ing and destructive.

The guid­ing dra­ma is an osten­si­bly con­ven­tion­al love tri­an­gle between Ángel (Jesús Meza), his wife Ale­jan­dra (Ruth Ramos), and her broth­er Fabián (Eden Villav­i­cen­cio). This real­is­tic set-up is com­pli­cat­ed by the addi­tion of an amorous ten­ta­cle mon­ster from out­er space, which grad­u­al­ly becomes an out­let for repressed sex­u­al desires. This alien is lit­tle more than a col­lec­tion of slimy pink appendages, almost laugh­ably phal­lic in design. Its role is not so much as an oth­er­world­ly being as it is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of pure human lust, a point which the film ham­mers home some­what laboriously.

Indeed, Escalante announces his car­nal inten­tions bold­ly and unam­bigu­ous­ly from the film’s first moments. An abstract open­ing image of an aster­oid float­ing in space quick­ly gives way to a dim­ly-lit shot of a naked woman, Veróni­ca (Simone Bucio), engaged in coitus with an slimy ten­ta­cle. It’s a star­ling and uncom­fort­able image which pro­vides only a flavour of what’s to come. From here, the per­verse sex­u­al ecsta­sy grant­ed by the crea­ture is an over­bear­ing pres­ence, con­trast­ed against the dull sex and gen­er­al tedi­um of every­day life.

This con­flict between prim­i­tive needs and soci­etal expec­ta­tions serves as the key to the film. The ​“untamed” of the title could just as well refer to any of the human char­ac­ters as it could the mon­ster, with each strug­gling to con­sol­i­date their lust with the com­pro­mis­es of their rela­tion­ships. With­in the alien they find a release of unfil­tered plea­sure – but at what cost?

These ideas and imagery are all appro­pri­ate­ly stim­u­lat­ing and dis­turb­ing, if a lit­tle heavy-hand­ed. But the film lacks a nar­ra­tive rigour to com­mu­ni­cate them effec­tive­ly, with mean­der­ing scenes of fam­i­ly bick­er­ing and pro­longed sequences of inter-species inter­course which some­times feel like provo­ca­tion for the sake of it. For an expe­ri­ence so heav­i­ly con­cerned with sen­su­al­i­ty, the last­ing impres­sion is odd­ly distant.