Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Tesis

The film by Alejandro Amenábar is precedent to his famous Abre los ojos. In fact Tesis is made a year earlier. I liked it. It has an interesting plot, good script, brilliant playing. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that on one hand it is made in the style of Hollywood thriller as it uses known clichés and twists, on the other there is nothing Hollywood about it in the atmosphere. That produces a powerful impact: you know approximately what to expect but your expectations might not be quite right. The clichés are tricking.

A university student of information department is writing a thesis about violence. She collects material about audio and visual violence for one of her chapters and for that wants to watch some violent movies. She finds that one of her student mates Chema has a good collection of unusual sort of movies. She also asks her professor for some material.

Evidently the professor found something in the storage but died watching the film he had got. Angela finds his body and takes the tape. She discovers that the movies is snuff: an actual filming of murdering. She shows the tape to Chema and they start investigation since he recognizes the girl on the tape.

So thus begins this film. They start with searching of a camera and soon Angela sees the boy filming. He immediately arouses her suspicion and she is watching him. She begins to seek deeper and soon discover things that go far beyond the subject of her thesis.

The movie is really good. They don't concentrate on violence fragments but they are part of the plot. The structure is interesting though probably not without some weak points and goofs but they come through easily. The double twist of suspects is really amazing. Though in general you can guess how the story moves, you are not quite sure who the murderer is till the end of the movie and that is pretty good for this sort of film. Besides the case happens to be much more complicated than it seemed before.

The atmosphere is created masterfully: there are some scenes that are made to tense the feel of horror like Angela running away from Bosco. There is no real reason why she runs but we can feel that she is scared. And then it happens that Bosco just wanted to talk to her. Or the scenes in the basement when the light suddenly turns off but the real terror comes later… The pace of action is quick and we see all the events from Angela's point of view. We see Angela's life while she leads that informal investigaton in the relations to other people, her troubles emotions, etc.

The cast is very good. I enjoyed the performance of Ana Torrent probably best known by La Piovra (The Octopus) TV-series about Italian mafia. Eduardo Noriega and Fele Martinez starred in Abre los ojos as well. The all give good psychological portraits of the characters. Faces reflect the characters quite well too.

Tesis is a classic psychological thriller leaving Hitchcock far behind. It combines visual effects with an interesting story and it makes it quite a good film to see.

Back to Movie Reviews                               Back to Home Page