Last year, between the two of us, we watched an average of 317 movies.
This year our goal is to top that by watching at least one a day.
And as an extra special torture, we've decided to write about all of them.

02 June 2008

Killing Words (aka. Palabras encadenadas), dir. Laura Mañá (2002)

NIKKI says:
Steve might be right -- maybe it is time for a foreign films extravaganza at our place? We're just enjoying them so much lately. I'd forgotten all about this one. We got it from BigPond Movies ages ago. It was so long ago now, that I thought it was a documentary about speech or bullying or something.

How wrong I was. This is a movie about a guy who kidnaps a woman and ties her to a chair. He plays her a videotape of him confessing to several murders of women and children (and taxi drivers, we learn later). Then he challenges her to word game called Word Chains, in which one person says a word and the other person must say a word that starts with the last syllable of the previous word. If she loses, he tells her, he will pluck out her eye.

Then the movie cuts forward in time, to the guy in an interrogation room, and every development you've just seen shifts a little bit out of place, and the film becomes something much more interesting than your basic killer-and-his-prey scenario.

The twists and turns are all really well done. Like 13 Tzameti, this is not a movie that wants to explain everything. It often lets you come to its conclusions rather than handing them to you. You have to do a little work, I guess. And it's exciting, brain-tingling work -- you're all, so he, but she, who's that, what's this... I love movies that turn your brain upside down, that challenge you, that tell stories in non-standard ways.

This is a great film. The direction was good, the acting was absolutely chilling, and the story was intriguing and new. We had a slight issue with the ending, it probably went on five minutes longer than it needed to, but that's not so bad.

3.5/5

STEVE says:
As with 13 Tzameti, the less said about this one, the better. I'll leave it at that, and let my rating speak for itself.

3.5/5