Uruguay: The Last Matinee (2020)
We're back on firm ground here: horror. The premise of The Last Matinee is initially extremely simple (locked in a cinema, the patrons watching a horror film are killed one by one) and the film opens with a lovely aerial tracking shot that follows the killer's car as he heads for the cinema. A couple of other shots as he enters show that the cinematography is going to be top notch, and that although the premise is simple, the visuals are anything but. They're extremely well orchestrated, and they promise a great deal.
They promise a great deal that the film resolutely fails to deliver.
Cinema language tells us that you have a premise (the big pitch. For Jaws it's 'a shark is terrorising a community') and then a story (the sheriff of an island community has to stop a shark killing people) and then a plot (how the story unfolds and how Chief Brody actually stops the shark) and some sub-plots (the Mayor wants to keep the beaches open; Amity means friendship, you know).
I'll give director/co-writer Maximiliano Contenti of Uruguay's The Last Matinee his due: I don't think I've ever seen a film before in which the premise, story and plot are all identical - quite literally 'a man kills people during a horror movie showing'. There's no depth, no growth, no character, no development, no insight, no twists, no revelations. There's just a man killing people for 90 minutes. Well, for 60, because it takes him ages to get going.
Eventually some of the patrons realise what's happening (although there are only two of them alive by this point, and the projectionist) and they run around in several scenes which threaten tension but then continue as the rest of the film has done - simply.
What's particularly startling is that as all of this is slowly happening, it looks fantastic. The lighting's amazing (quite literally, sadly, because this must be the brightest screening of a film I've ever seen - you can see everything in that cinema, except, presumably, the screen given how bright the lighting is) and every scene is framed exquisitely, which only serves to make this even more annoying. If you're going for some kind of grindhouse giallo feel, at least have the decency to look rough. I'd have probably enjoyed this if it had looked vaguely homemade (there's a whole separate discussion to be had here about how aesthetics colour our judgement of what we're watching, but that's a discussion to be (mise en) seen another day). This simple plot would suit some kind of '70s homage. But by making it look so clear and crisp, one then expects the same crispness to extend to the story. Hell, we never even know why the madman is doing this (clearly because it's a film in which this kind of thing happens) which would be something I could live with if the film didn't keep hinting at other explanations (the jar of eyeballs, for instance) which never arrive. It's frustrating. At least The Boat had the decency to be minimalist; this is so visually sumptuous it promises everything, then delivers nothing. Except eyeballs.
Talking of eyeballs (and, yes, I get it; viewers/eyes plus references to Argento), the gore is very inventive - some of the kills are highly innovative - and that's obviously where most of the writing time went, but that's only good for a highlights reel, not to sustain a feature.
And it's not even a bloody matinee - it's an early evening showing at best.
Disc: Blu-ray (Region B, UK)
Source: HMV
Availability: Widely available; DVD and BD releases in most territories