Los Muertos (2004) User Reviews

Meditative metaphors of a man in the jungle, going down river.

[roger-212 · 8/10 · 25 April 2005]

Los Muertos is a contemplative and controlled film about men in their environment. The film is incredibly understated, but never boring, in that it is always moving. The lead character, Vargas, is simply moving towards where he wants to go, first to deliver a letter one of the inmates left behind gives him for his daughter, then to find his own grown daughter.

The poetry and grace in the storytelling is in simply watching this man, who has very little interactions with other humans, move forward. He is a man of little words, and of deliberate (and sometimes startling) action. The jungle is a powerful metaphor, of course, as is the river he travels in a small boat. The details of his journey are compelling and almost hypnotic - his smoking-out of a hive to get honeycomb, his sudden grabbing of a goat on the shore to kill it (my, I wish I had been warned of this scene - it happens in one cut and is not faked), etc.

An elliptical comment early on, in which a man cleaning a fish asks if he really killed his brothers, is answered by Vargas, "I don't remember all that anymore." That's about the extent of the backstory, and the film allows you to consider this man's place and if he can ever find what he's going towards. Less is more in this case, and the film-making ends up being powerful, and evoking Anonioni or Dreyer in its confidence that showing a person in his/her surroundings is sometimes drama enough.

don't leave before the credits roll

[dragonpenchant · 7/10 · 19 September 2004]

This is an unapologetic slow burner of a movie. Its mysterious opening, sumptuous cinematography and wonderfully natural performances take on some of the burden left by the almost complete absence of dialogue or traditional narrative. Although, I admittedly felt antsy and uneasy at some points and you'll no doubt be asking yourself somewhere along the journey: "where's this going" or more impatiently perhaps "what's the point". I'm still not sure i have those answers, but this film definitely gets under your skin after you've left your seat. Speaking of which, I implore you to not leave that seat before all the credits have rolled. The accompanying music is simply amazing.

Difficult film, strange cinema from Argentina.

[dmtls · 8/10 · 22 November 2004]

The film start.Place : somewhere in South America.The strange odyssey of a mysterious man of some age begins here.He sets off for a journey. Few characters on his way, almost no talking.The unwelcoming natural environment always present.Some really spectacular scenery.

The movie goes on in the same slow pace from the beginning to the end. Two or three scenes are a bit loose and for me boring but otherwise the speed it's OK.It helps to create atmosphere and makes it look like a ritual.And ritual I think is the keyword for this strange and "unfriendly" film.Then comes the unexpected end to leave all questions unanswered.It's a real creepy movie that crawls underneath your skin whether you want it or not.If you are in for odd films do not miss this one.

Hearts of darkness

[Chris Knipp · 9/10 · 26 April 2005]

"Los Muertos" made me think of various things -- Hemingway, John Boorman's 1984 "The Emerald Forest," the Mexican Carlos Reygadas 2002 "Japón," the films of Bruno Dumont. This film shares "Japón's" use of natural settings and non-actors for a powerful minimalist effect. It's got the macho focus on simple survival tasks you find in Hemingway's Spanish novels and early short stories set in the Michigan woods. When "Los Muertos'" protagonist Vargas (Argentino Vargas) gets out of jail he goes into the outback He travels downriver in a rowboat with a few provisions, feeds himself from a tree, slaughters an animal and cleans it in the boat. The crowded, open prison and the shops Vargas goes to when he first gets out are busy -- "civilized." Then he enters his own "Heart of Darkness" like the boy Tomme in "The Emerald Forest" and becomes a different person -- shucking off clothes, money, possessions, bringing out new skills. Like "The Man" in "Japón" Vargas is going to a remote region on an ambiguous mission and the two movies both take long looks at the land and listens to real rural people. Like Bruno Dumont, Alonso isn't afraid of long still shots and 'longeurs,'and like Dumont his sex is crude and real. Like Dumont's, Alonso's protagonist is inarticulate and vaguely dangerous.

We see a lot of Vargas at first just sitting, sipping maté, staring into space at the prison, like you do. But Alonso's camera is also lithe and mobile from that first long hypnotic panning and tracking shot in the forest before the story begins and it continues to be supple and quick as it follows Vargas on his journey.

Style apart, Alonso takes us to a place we don't know and he keeps us there. He doesn't explain; his film suggests you can get very close to things and still not understand them, and sometimes that's the way it has to be.

The actor, Argentino Vargas, resembles Franco Citti, whom Pasolini often used in his films for sly, evil characters. Like Citti, he has a rough, sensuous quality. He's paunchy but muscular, tan, and agile; he's a handsome man gone to seed, a little 'indio', a little worldly. He's polite and neutral with people, but there's something not said, something blank and mysterious and menacing about him too, a sense of an unexplained purpose. This man is very, very alone, and his outdoor skills outline his ability to remain that way. We don't know what he's up to. We don't know what he's capable of.

This reserve, this mystery, is an essential element in much good storytelling that can make the simplest tale compulsive and memorable, which is what "Los Muertos" gradually becomes. Carlos Reygadas also uses it.

Since "Los Muertos" tells us so little and there are so few spoken words, little bits of information jolt us awake and our minds race. "So you're leaving!" a young man yells at Vargas at the prison. He comes too close, then disappears as if he was angry and was pulled away -- and we may think Vargas is planning to escape and word's gotten around. But instead he gets formally released.

Watching Vargas'journey suggests what travel or nature movies would be like if they had no music or commentary -- how much more powerful a camera can be without mediation, when it's just there without conventional framing devices. A long shot just shows Vargas in the rowboat, rowing on the river, coming toward us. There's nothing else. The camera is invisible, moving imperceptibly. The shot is powerful and extraordinarily beautiful and alive because it just is.

There's a boldness about Alonso's method. Some shots may seem too long. But there's an exhilarating sense of really being wholly inside the experience; of having lost ourselves completely in the story "Los Muertos" tells. I got that feeling when I first watched Boorman's "Emerald Forest," and it was a strange and alien -- and at the same time thrilling -- feeling to walk out of the theater into the nighttime city when the movie was over but I was still under its spell, my mind lingering in the Amazon forest.

Lisandro Alonso, who's only thirty years old, reminds us that great film-making can be a matter of letting the camera and what it sees speak for themselves. He throws out the paraphernalia. During the course of the film, we've seen and heard some surprising things. At the end, we're suddenly excluded. Vargas goes somewhere, and the camera doesn't follow him. It stops showing us what's going on. The camera has been our eyes and ears and this abrupt shutdown is a shock. You walk out of the theater and you carry that sense of shock with you. It's a brilliant ending to a haunting film.

Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival April 26, 2005.

...

[TheFerryman · 13 October 2004]

This is not a film for everyone. The slow pacing can easily get to the nerve of the toughest film watcher. The tale of a released convict and his voyage to reunite with his family is completely ascetic and deprived of embellishments of any kind. Still, the images are hypnotic and set the viewer in a trance-like experience. Vargas' dryness is much more interesting that the dullness of many other protagonists of the so-called 'new argentine cinema'. It is everything that he conceals us what makes us interested in him. The narrative evokes the literature of Horacio Quiroga, an Uruguayan writer who frequently used the Mesopotamian jungle as his main character. Every inch of that jungle breathes, and compared to it, every human being in the picture is the dead referred by the title. Alonso has created a fascinating piece of machinery that flow quiet and slowly like that ever-present river, despite some pointless 'contemplative' scenes that might have been included to fill screen-time. Alonso's virtue is his ability to tell a story visually –this is more silent than a Murnau film-, and his film-making makes full sense in the viewer's mind. He's miles away from the pretentiousness of the director that made 'Japón', a film with which it shares a number of elements. One admires his ability to walk over successfully that thin line that divides cinema from poetic arty trash.

Lisandro's Slow Release

[zacknabo · 7/10 · 30 September 2016]

Slow, methodic, contemplative cinema is hard work; this can be seen in Lisandro Alonso's (Jauja) offering from 2004. Meet Vargas a middle aged man in jail in provincial Argentina. Very naturally and methodically he goes about his daily routine, until finally he is unreleased. A free man he now wants to visit his now adult daughter, which we and Vargas discover is no short trip.

The opening sequence of the film is spellbinding. A camera slowly hovers through the brush of a dense forest. The viewer never feels that this is some sort of POV gag. Instead, the camera itself maneuvers as a spirit, only incidentally uncovering what the audience will soon uncover. Alonso's blending of the temporal and spatial aspects of his film's world in this scene and using the camera as a removed observer that floats about ethereally is reminiscent in ways of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in any of his jungle sequences—and is a usual tool used by most masters of the "slow" cinema. After a slow tracking shot through the forest, which allows for burst in natural light here and there, there is a small bloodied body, yet Alonso keeps the film understated and the camera keeps gliding along in an ever more haunting track…natural light bursts through and then it's back to the dimly lit landscape, until in the distance, corner of the screen we see what appears to be another dead body, but the figure is out of focus and nearly out of frame, as the camera must make its way to the horror. This method has a particular way in building a natural suspense. Now we/the camera, see a partial figure. It is a man with a bloody machete and he stands only half framed as if he wants to escape but knows he is trapped. He moves toward us/the camera but there is no close-up, the man does not stop, the camera does not pan to follow the man, the man walks directly past the camera and that it is it: hold the shot, and then cut to the film's protagonists, Vargas. This sequence is done masterfully. Alonso flexes his muscles in showing us some of the raw power of "slow" cinema. The economics of this sequence for Alonso is nearly immaculate. He establishes the natural sensibility that the film will carry throughout. The use of natural light, longer tracking shots and medium framing rounds out the visual style of Los Muertos and lends itself to the mise-en-scene; the cinematography and direction is gritty, natural and real and so is the story that the audience views like the camera: slightly detached. And we quickly find out the murder was a flashback, allegedly committed by Vargas when he was younger—killing his two brothers with a machete.

Vargas appears to be a nice enough man. He communicates with the other men in the prison camp and even appears to have friendships, yet stays distant and at times introspective. Once outside of prison he lives and moves like a survivalist, a native who is wholly intertwined with nature. But what are the points of these observations? This is where the film begins to stumble. Vargas laboriously treks through forest, swamps, small villages which all seem to be unchanged in his many long years locked away. Okay, has he changed? Does it matter? We know he murdered his own brothers. We never know why. Yet, one never feels any suspense or unease in the possibility of Vargas relapsing into violence. Though one poignant and sad moment in the film is when Vargas stops in a small shop to buy his daughter a dress. The salesman talks about how the daughter will love the dress and asks what size and what does the daughter look like, but Vargas doesn't know and relates to the man that he doesn't know what she looks like. The scene is written and acted with poise and perfect pitch, never cheaply attempting a mad grab at the viewer's heartstrings. This scene is juxtaposed perfectly with the very visceral and matter-of-fact blowjob which he seeks out immediately after his release.

Outside of a few moments, Los Muertos seems to be as aimless as Vargas appears at times. As a viewer you want it to have that "pop," that "aha" moment, but it never materializes. "Muertos" is an interesting early work from Alonso and certainly worth the watch. It just misses in giving substance visually and thematically to the scene, failing to consistently inform the viewer with what is not just being stared at in the frame but outside the frame that the other slow cinematic masters of our time give us jammed packed in every scene like one would see by one of the meditative Taiwanese masters or even Alonso's own countrywoman, Lucrecia Martel. Will Vargas reach his daughter? Is there something to be discovered in his arduous journey? The main problem is Alonso trips up in not only keeping the viewer engaged but maintaining that the viewer care what happens to Vargas. He succeeds, I believe, in keeping the viewer's feelings about Vargas at the very least neutral even though we are aware of the double murder of his siblings. But Alonso takes this leverage with the audience nowhere and most of the film as a whole feels as loose, wild and unkempt as the swamps and forests that litter the film's provincial Argentinean landscape.

Almost wordless, poetic and disturbing.

[runamokprods · 9/10 · 1 August 2010]

Haunting, meditative, enigmatic film, with very little dialogue. In the Argentine forest a man is released from a rural prison after serving times for killing his two brothers. Most of the movie is his boat journey home to find his daughter. When he gets there he encounters his grandchildren. Is he guilty, innocent? Will he kill the kids? Are they the bodies at the beginning of the film, or are those his brothers? The lack of answers could feel like a cop out, but left me with a nightmarish feeling of open ended horror. The style is simple and spare, with long wordless takes. But we know there's something going on, even if we never fully get the answers. Sort of a cinematic, visual equivalent of the plays of Harold Pinter. NB: The US Facets DVD is a disappointingly weak transfer

One should tell viewers that "Los Meurtos" is not an experimental film.

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 5/10 · 8 October 2014]

A viewer can expect a lot in terms of action and plot from a film about a prisoner who has been released from a prison.However,there are films which give the impression of visual stories where a lot happens even though viewers are unable to make sense of those happenings.In such films,a conjuring effect is created according to which nothing seems to happen but in reality a lot of minor events are shown to happen at regular intervals in the film.It is from such an angle that viewers can watch "Los Muertos" directed by talented Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso.The ruthlessness with which two murders are committed in the beginning lead viewers to believe that mystery and suspense would be evident through the film.This belief is quickly contradicted when the film begins to concentrate more on daily life of the protagonist.The result is good for eyes but fails to fulfill the expectations of the mind.Los Muertos is not an experimental film.It is a normal feature film which any ordinary viewer would like to watch.

This movie stinks

[ajrg-17-381639 · 1/10 · 6 December 2013]

Boring, long takes, pretentious as hell, pointless, ambiguous end. A waste of time only a full of himself critic would say he enjoyed. Nice photography. Zero plot, an effort at no character development and I do not mean this metaphorically or that they tried and failed. Almost no dialog.

The supposed story is of a man who kills his brothers gets out of jail and is on his way to see his daughter. It sounds better than the movie is. One wonders if the director was a self indulgent asshole since he photographs each scene in what appears to be real time, or if he was an eight year old.