“Inhuman ecstasy fulfilled,” reads the tagline of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession. It tells a story of a marriage coming completely unraveled, replete with deception, doppelgängers, and a grotesque, blood-covered creature. I won’t spoil the film for those who haven’t seen this wonderful entry in the “She’s Just Like Me” canon, but inhuman ecstasy is certainly fulfilled. Amat Escalante’s 2016 film The Untamed (or La región salvaje in Spanish) ends with the epilogue “In memory of Andrzej Żuławski,” confirming that these two movies are in conversation with each other. But where Żuławski’s story slowly leads us down the dark spiral of divorce, Escalante drops us right into the mouth of madness.
Three of our four main characters are introduced mid-coitus. The first person we meet is Veronica, naked in a barn, just wrapping up a session with…a tentacled alien fuckbeast, for lack of a better term. Then, we cut to Angel and Alejandra, in the middle of what seems to be very disappointing marital sex, which ends with Ale trying to bring herself to climaxin the shower alone. We soon find out that Angel, a man who is a living avatar for machísmo, is having an affair with Alejandra’s brother, Fabián.
Every sexual encounter in The Untamed is framed in opposition to another one we’ve seen in the film. Would you rather conform to a societal/cultural norm, or would you rather the true pleasure that comes with freedom? Escalante’s film navigates with nuance the concepts of the nuclear family, sexual pleasure, masculinity, and female friendship. This humanist drama is essentially a chamber piece—though the locations change and shift quite a bit, it feels as though we’re there, watching through a peephole as our four main characters navigate the claustrophobia of modern existence, its constraints both physical and emotional. The first time I saw The Untamed, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles had invited Amat Escalante to present a career retrospective of his films. In the post-film Q&A, he shared that the SFX house that created this wonderful creature always repurposes their designs. According to Escalante, Veronica’s pleasure-giving friend appears as an extra in one of the new Star Wars movies. Such is the slippery slope of fame; where one day you’re the leading man, and the next you’re second-tier talent. All joking aside, it’s funny to think about how an independent filmmaker from Mexico sees this Earth-visitor as a path to sexual freedom, while one of the biggest media corporations in the world used it as window-dressing. What the western world would call a science-fiction addition to the story is more in line with the South and Central American art of magical realism— and that magically real element of the story serves only to ground the narrative more in humanity.
The Untamed really has one question at its center: what is unnatural? Escalante’s film hopes to change your definition of the word, or at the very least soften its hard edges.
