Exceptional . . . and exceptionally creepy. Lucía Puenzo adapts & directs her fact-inspired speculative novel about an Argentinian family who unknowingly host notorious Nazi Concentration Camp doctor Josef Mengele for a few months in 1960 during his three decade peripatetic years of hiding in South America. The film pretty much swept the Argentinian Award circuit and showed at Cannes, but seems unaccountably little known Stateside. Alex Brendemühl is quietly friendly (before turning quietly threatening) as the chilling eugenics enthusiast who quickly insinuates himself into the family dynamic of Diego Peretti, Natalia Oreiro and their large family as they reopen a luxurious hotel the wife’s parents operated. The doctor is not only pleased to find this hideaway, but doubly intrigued by young daughter Lilith who suffers from growth hormone deficiency and by the mother when he learns she’s expecting twins, the doctor’s particular obsession. With a secret Nazi estate just down the shore line, a German-oriented private school the children attend & an Israel undercover agent hovering in the school’s photography department, the possibilities & dangers of overstuffed narrative are obvious. In hindsight, it’s hard to relate the story without seeing a thousand and one angles for Black Comedy. (Including an unfortunate likeness between Florencia Bado as the growth-challenged daughter and the young Veronica Cartwright as she looked in Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS/’63.) Yet the film doesn’t play that way at all, gathering and holding a hushed sense of foreboding that avoids oversteps into melodrama as it manipulates a troubled teen starved for attention & authority.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: A batty commercial thriller built from similar elements in THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL/’78. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-boys-from-brazil-1978.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: That cheap horror pic getting such a big reaction from the students at a showing is TEENAGE ZOMBIES/’59. Smart choice, like so much in here.
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