‘Open Body’: a gothic fairy tale

After a fascinating documentary, ‘Olvida Monelos’, Asturian Ángeles Huerta debuts with her first feature film, ‘Cuerpo abierto’. Screened at the gala organized by RTVE in the last 67th edition of the Seminci de Valladolid and also in the Esbilla category of the 60th Gijón Film Festival, where it won the award for best Asturian feature film. The director takes a radical turn with this proposal which adapts a story by Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrínwith which he moved to Galicia in 1909, to a small town where the world of the living and the world of the dead live in a sort of limbo.

The film begins with clear references to gothic terror, one of the extensions with which Romanticism had a stagecoach which leads to a young professor reading “Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James, while being transferred to the small town, located between the border between Spain and Portugal, in Lobosandaus, involved in a sort of combination of mysticism and obscurantism. Since then, Don Miguel, the Distinguished Professor, could very well stand alongside Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

And he can flank Crane when he’s representing reason, science, enlightenment in the face of the syncretistic beliefs of the inhabitants of the region, in which the religious and the profane are divided by a widespread line. Huerta, who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel García, knows how to delve into the depths of the spirit of gothic romanticism to create a parable about desire and repression, in which its erudite master protagonist ends up, little by little, letting himself be carried away due to a spiral of hallucinations that make him a suspicious narrator, as that mystical atmosphere ends up breaking the logical line, which causes reverie and hallucinations to mix with the main plot.

A film with the spirit of gothic terror, in the purest style of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ or ‘Another Turn of the Screw’

And this is where Huerta takes that professor to the extreme, whose arrogance for knowledge ends up being his undoing. In this respect, the delivery of Tamar Novas stands out. The Galician interpreter knows how to convey that sensation of descent into hell that his character feels, which gradually ends up carried away by obscurantism and legends. Together with him, the Portuguese Victória Guerra and María Vázquez stand out, both representing two different figures of femininity. The first, trapped in an unhappy marriage, while the second feels possessed by the spirit of lusa’s dead lover, this is the leitmotif of the filmwith which Huerta takes the opportunity to capture his game of duality.

The filmmaker proves that she has a hand in the horror genre, with a feature film with a mystical atmosphere that knows how to combine folklore with the supernatural and shows how syncretism and religion dance in a dance of beliefs that heightens that feeling of duality and ambiguity. ‘Cuerpo abierto’ is a proposal that follows the line of other titles that recover the ancient traditions of the country to reinterpret them in a modern key, as happened with ‘Akelarre’ or ‘Errementari’. The result is a hypnotic debut for Huerta in fiction, which projects him into genre cinema.

Note: 7

The best: How, little by little, the protagonist changes his character, ending up with a much darker personality.

Worse: It ends up being an overly confusing story.