From Mexico comes to our attention. Purgatory, a short horror film about ten minutes in length that is distinguished by particularly sublime (very artistic) direction and photography (by Carlos Davis Colin). Award-winning "Best Director" at the The Optical Theatre Film Festival 2017, Mexican director, photographer and producer Adrián Landeros (Soul and Mud, Continuos) also took part in writing the script together with Juan Pablo Elorriaga.
Purgatory (aka Purgatory) is an example of cinematic perfection in which other art forms such as music and, above all, painting converge. Not leaving out horror, the genre to which this short belongs, Purgatory is a purely surreal work capable of transporting the viewer into an oppressive dream dimension, more precisely, into the personal purgatory of a suicide's soul.
Slow and elegant initial camera movements (in which the story's baleful imprint is hinted at through words and sounds) then give way to subjective shots laden with technical virtuosity. In this way, the viewer's eyes and ears become those of the protagonist: a pianist who, destroyed by a life of suffering, takes his own life by hanging himself. From that moment, his soul will be condemned to relive the bleakest episodes he experienced by drawing on a reality full of memories, symbolism and inner demons. Helping him to become aware of his situation will be a very emancipated painter who will tell him his story and also his end.
Adrián Landeros' shots "flip" rooms, "cross" floors and walls, even objects such as mattresses and canvases, penetrating deeply into each and every object, or rather, into the material of which it is composed. In this enthralling visual, twisted and unreal, where our eyes become those of a desperate soul, probably in search of redemption, the flashbacks evoked by the artist's narrative present checkerboards reminiscent of many works by Salvador Dali while the huge woman soiled with her mother's milk evokes shapely Boterian figures. Strong images, these, accompany a hellish dimension, made even more suffocating by weeping and wailing to which are added the labored and weary breaths of the spirit.
The finale, deeply bitter and pessimistic, seems to identify (through camera movements and sound) the soul in pain with a frightened bird. A metaphor, this one, that forever seals the tragic condition of the spirit of the protagonist, stuck eternally in his personal and traumatic hell.
Gloomy and suffocating, Purgatory Is a heinous and magnificent descent into pain and despair.
In the cast: Armando Holzer, Hector Molina, Hector Trejo and Alicia Camps.
Purgatory had its Italian premiere last Dec. 1 at the Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples.
