ARGENTO, STRICKLAND, CRONENBERG, POLANSKI, ROEG ALSO MENTIONED IN REVIEWS
From Argentina, Natalia Meta's second feature, The Intruder, had its world premiere this past weekend at the Berlin International Film Festival. Prior to the screening, Variety's John Hopewell and Emiliano Granada had posted the psycho-sexual thriller's teaser trailer, writing that the film is "Lensed in a polished fashion by ace Uruguayan D.P. Bárbara Álvarez – if the teaser is anything to go by – and sporting a dash of Polanski – the dead lover – and the pervasive pathology of De Palma, The Intruder, as suggested by [Meta's debut feature] Death in Buenos Aires, announces a director who has no interest whatsoever in naturalism – seen in not only settings but her commanding visual style. Both of Meta’s movies explore a very broad color palette and, like DePalma’s, do not fall entirely into any genre category."
With the help of Google translations, here are a few samples from reviews posted following the Berlinale screening:
Diego Batlle, Otros Cines Europa
From stress to psychic disorders, from pills to recurring nightmares, from unmanageable energies to indecipherable sounds and ghostly apparitions, The Intruder (a story inspired by the novel The Lesser Evil, by C.E. Feiling) is an increasingly ominous psychological thriller which has clear influences from the movies of Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg, and a certain aesthetic of the giallo, and more specifically from the work of Dario Argento.
Joan Sala, FILM IN
Neither the Latin American cinema, nor the genre cinema, let alone the cinema directed by women, is usually habitual in the competitive sections of the European class A festivals. Similarly last year there were hardly two women in competition at the previous Venice Festival and no Latin representative at the last Cannes Festival. Well, The Intruder inaugurates the competitive section of this 70 edition of the Berlinale breaking both stigmas at a stroke. The second film of the Argentine filmmaker Natalia Meta is a disturbing psychological thriller that borders the universes of Brian De Palma and Peter Strickland, in turn breathing the essence of Sebatian Lelio's Gloria.
Diego Lerer, Micropsia
The director of DEATH IN BUENOS AIRES - a film that, beyond its very obvious problems, evidenced an unusual formal audacity in the national genre cinema - applies to the Feiling text resources that could well have come out of a European thriller from the '70s and early' 80s, stepping a little on the giallo, another bit on the classic Nicolas Roeg DON'T LOOK NOW (which met in Argentina with the curious and unforgettable title of VENICE RED SHOCKING ) and somewhat more, moving from the mainland, in the darkest films of Brian de Palma of that time as OBSESSION, DRESSED TO KILL or, for its specific theme, BLOW OUT.