Embryo: Middling Chilean Sci-Fi/Horror Repays Viewing Dilignece With Scant Dividends
By Thom Ernst
Rating: C
Two young hikers go missing after off-trekking into the beautiful but rugged paths of Snowdevil Mountain.
Evelyn (Romina Perazzo) and Kevin (Domingo Guzmán) are not the first to disappear in an area that has long been documenting reports of strange lights, weird noises, and extra-terrestrial sightings.
The site is off-limits to tourists. Be that as it may, tourists keep coming, although not all of them leave. Those who do manage to make their way back down are never quite the same.
A newscaster reporting on this most recent incident states that outsiders dismiss rumours of alien contact while local police take in every account. It’s the first glaring indication that Embryo is indeed science fiction.
Sadly, Snowdevil Mountain is not a real place, at least not one that registers on Google Maps. If it were, then perhaps Embryo, a recent Chilean sci-fi/horror, would have the edge of rumoured authenticity going for it.
As it is, Embryo is a routine alien abduction story repackaged as an experimental film.
Director Patricio Valladares’ distressed-styled filmmaking, with its fluctuating time-structure and recurring frames, likely intends to mimic the fragmented memories frequently associated with the retelling of alien abduction, like a fevered night intermittent with short, coherent waking periods.
The effect is more confusing than engaging, more irritating than provocative. Valladares pieces together a narrative from a randomly staged hit-parade of horror favourites from flesh-eaters to the possessed to mysterious unseen monsters. But Valladares’ effort is undermined with intense close-ups, jostling camera-work, and rapid-fire edits.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Several stories get tossed about in the film’s mercifully brief 82 minutes. One tale involves found footage from a film crew shooting a dance video. Another follows a series of home movies charting the family of a precocious little girl who makes occasional references to a Martian Mommy.
Both storylines are presented as happening prior to the missing hikers. Things aren’t likely to end well—it’s the least we can hope for after being subjected to shoddy dance routines and annoying doting fathers.
There are also scenes of a man (Cristian Cuentrejo) scouring over computer data while guzzling back glasses of orange juice. The orange juice is an observation worthy of nothing beyond the idea that this determined (yet to be identified) man is too focused on unraveling the secret of Snowdevil Mountain to break for a proper meal.
But it’s Evelyn’s and Kevin’s story that anchors the narrative.
Evelyn wakes to what sounds like growling. Unable to properly wake Kevin, Evelyn ventures off into the woods, unfazed by the possibility of what she might encounter. It is always strikingly absurd how far movie campers stray from the campsite following an unidentified noise in the dead of night wearing nothing but their underwear.
The weightiest implication Embryo harbours any resemblance of a critique is that it sets out to make sexual violence more violent than it already is. And not in a way that reflects true horror, as is so effectively depicted in the recent Canadian shocker, Violation.
Instead, Embryo ups the ante with a raped-by-an-alien scenario and in what is undoubtedly the messiest insemination scene put on film.
Embryo is not the first movie to suggest that sexual assault is even more toxic when the perpetrator is imagined as otherworldly—ghosts, demons, aliens, and even robots have got in on the act. But even in a film as starkly thematic to the idea of rape as Alien (1979), the playing field is leveled by putting men at equal risk.
That Embryo works towards a conclusion where all pieces come together is something of a miracle. But a movie that is neither particularly shocking nor disturbing and with no ambition beyond being an alien-abduction story shouldn’t demand this much work from its audience.
Embryo is a movie that demands our full attention without doing anything to earn it.
Embryo. Directed by Patricio Valladares. Starring Romina Perazzo, Domingo Guzmán, and Cristian Cuentrejo. Available now on demand.