The Untamed

Is it possible to be repulsed by your own tangled mass of desire? Well, yes. I mean, who even knows what it is or where it comes from? Some residual animal instinct perhaps. In Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante’s fourth feature, sci-fi horror The Untamed, it came straight outta outer space and takes the form of a fleshy sex blob. Housed in a rustic country cabin, a sullen sad-eyed woman named Verónica (Bucio) acts as its unofficial lover/victim-procurer. It’s unclear how old she was when she became “involved” with this thing, but one gets the sense the answer to that question is not old enough.

In that sleepy way that people meet each other in movies, she befriends married couple Alejandra (Ramos) and Ángel (Meza), by way of Ale’s brother Fabián (Villavicencio), who works at the local hospital and treats Verónica after a “dog bite.” Now here’s a tangled mass if there ever was one. The incongruously named Ángel is the picture of toxic masculinity: abusive, abrasive, rude, an inconsiderate lover, a disinterested father, a man who takes what he wants when he wants it. He has a boyish and helpless face, and he’s a total piece of shit. The couple’s younger son won’t stop sneaking bites of chocolate even though he has a severe allergy and knows it will bring him extreme discomfort. (Not unlike the way some adults return to booze again and again no matter how awful the hangover.) That’s the duality that sometimes courses through desire: We want pleasure in the moment, even if it hurts later on. Even when we know better. This duality is also depicted in the half-dark, half-light of some scenes – a darkened room with the couple quietly talking, juxtaposed with a glowing TV screen in the corner.

In a similar fashion, the film’s music score is both high-strung and ominous – at times ringing like the aftermath of a shotgun blast and at others slow and dark like a body being dragged across a floor. The woods surrounding the sex monster’s home are oftentimes shrouded in fog. In a scene early on in the film, Verónica’s figure is almost completely obscured by it, as though she is walking a fine line between desire and obsession, a line that exists somewhere in the haze.