Arrebato

Writing this review after watching movie just now. It was a slow,bizarre, unexpected and confused thrill feeling in the end.

Up to 1 hour 30 minutes, i was wondering what is the movie about. Last 30 minutes was making sense or a story or screenplay.

It was a kind of slow paced mystery,supernatural and finally let u guess movie.

I felt good but not a mystery or thriller or supernatural genre.

It is food for movie critics and movie lovers( I am not Either)

Good one but not for Mystery/Thriller entertainment lovers.

Obviously, you will receive a surprise from this enrapturing film due to strange denounement and secondary characters. Slowly in the begining, it justifies that scenes during the film while you get catch for the story unconciously. Special mention to the work of Will More, a curious actor who didn´t work in cinema never more, only little appearances on TV series. Correct performance of Eusebio Poncela but he is better actor now, the same to a young and inexpert Cecilia Roth. Definitely you have to see this movie and think about it during hours before you beat the insomnia that the film could produce. Very disturbing.

From initial ridicule (despite the official recommendation as a quality feature) to flat-out praise, it took more than twenty years to realize the seminal influence of this film on Spanish production, from Almodovar onwards. It draws many influences from the Warhol-esque New York underground scene but has tremendous scenes.

Whoever wants to understand what Betty Boop was all about, must see Cecilia Roth dance scene, it is fabulous.

Contains a lot of drug addiction references, which should be seen as an analogy to the addiction to capturing moving pictures and watching them. The only way for a film director to get rid of the latter is to dissolve into the industry.

A very disturbing Spanish cult movie, involving drugs addiction, the dark side of love and the passion of filming. For most of the critics is also a horror movie and a vampires story. And every time you watch it you can find in it something new, indeed.

Shooted in the years of the Spanish political and cultural dawn, but going away from the mainstream, and with a very low budget, it drives you from the beginning to the end in so a magnetic and weird plot that you can't stop watching.

But Arrebato is also remarkable because of the astonishing performance of the main characters couple, Eusebio Poncela and Cecilia Roth. Most in the claustrophobic atmosphere of their bedroom, it reminds some highlights of Ingmar Bergman films like 'Scener ur ett aktenskapps' o 'Saraband'

Jose, a director of schlock horror films, is a high-functioning heroin addict who's experiencing a burnout phase in his career, and frustration over a rocky, on-again/off-again relationship he can't seem to terminate. He receives an unexpected parcel from a fleeting acquaintance named Pedro, a cousin of an old flame, who makes raw naturalistic films variably similar to the works of STAN BRAKHAGE. The parcel contains a filmreel, Pedro's housekey, and a cassette tape on which he's recorded himself expounding a bizarre personal odyssey which initialized at a time when Jose had assisted him in matters of interval time filming. The fervid, gravelly-voiced storytelling spans the film's remaining duration, cryptically implying that Pedro's Super8 camera has taken on a predatory sentience vaguely vampiric in nature...by sucking people away from the Earthly plane, and into the cinematic one(a metamorphosis which Pedro insists is sublimely blissful). This outlandish disclosure is confirmed when Jose watches the filmreel, at which point he realizes why Pedro had sent him the key to his apartment. It is there that Jose will face his ordained destiny under the officious eye of Pedro's camera.

That ARREBATO comes from a director with such a minimal body of work is surprising...it's a professionally appointed abstraction which is comparable to little else, though touches of LYNCH, CRONENBERG, and ECKHART SCHMIDT are sometimes evident. It's a cynical, allegorical, and occasionally plaintive excursion into a dreary alternate reality, underscored with notes of homoerotic suggestion, heroin chic, and pointed political commentary.

There's an intriguing mystery in Pedro's prolonged tape-recorded anecdotes...it's an abstruse and strangely tantalizing expository device which juxtaposes the film's deliberately dallying visual tedium. Narcotics are a preponderance of the proceedings, chiefly regarding their potency to electrify creative vitality while simultaneously draining it dry. I might argue that the "vampire" of the story isn't the actual, tangible camera...rather, it is cinema itself. More specifically, it's the ART of cinema, which, like a god, casts judgment in accordance with one's personal filmic refinements (**spoiler**) It would seem that Pedro has been raptured to a higher plane of existence, owing to his impassioned visionary buoyancy. Jose, conversely, has lost that creative brio, and is thus rendered unworthy or ineligible for ascension. He is denied passage, and promptly exterminated.

As extravagantly outré as it is, ARREBATO is handled quite confidently, and the key players vitalize their characters with moxie. Sure, it's blemished, and certainly not for all tastes, but it's audaciously and undeniably sui generis. That's mighty refreshing in a time when remakes of remakes are the order of the day.

7/10...a worthy legacy for its late director, whose too-brief life is said to have had many unfortunate parallels with this film.