The Wait: Plenty of Atmosphere, Not Enough Story

By Liz Braun

Rating: B

The Wait is a modern morality fable that initially unfolds like a revenge Western but then transforms into a supernatural horror story.

Writer-director F. Javier Gutierrez has come up with a grim Monkey’s Paw sort of tale constructed on the pre-democracy class divide of 50 years ago in Spain. Rich and poor are clearly delineated. And entirely separate.

Against the parched landscape of Andalusia, Eladio (Victor Clavijo) makes a decision about a job that will affect his life and his family. He agrees to manage the hunting estate of a wealthy man (Pedro Casablanc), leaving town and moving into the countryside to do so — a move that his wife (Ruth Diaz) is not happy about.

Three years go by. Eladio’s son (Moises Ruiz) is now a capable adolescent. The boy takes on adult responsibilities related to managing hunting stands on the estate. More stands means more paying customers to hunt deer and boar, and the estate usually has 10 such areas.

Eladio is asked to increase the number of hunting stands, but he refuses — that would be dangerous. His wife reminds him that they could use the extra money. And she calls him a coward for refusing to allow more stands.

Against his better judgement, Eladio goes ahead and permits more hunting stands. Tragedy results, and the film then follows his slow descent into madness and grief-fuelled vengeance.

Long before anything bad happens, The Wait has prepared the way with dread and tension all around. Everything is dry and dusty in the heat of the day; in the garden, tomatoes are touched with rot, pecked by birds or somehow otherwise sullied. Something is very wrong between Eladio and his wife — she radiates chilly unhappiness — and pieces of everyone’s clothing have begun to vanish. It’s all strange and uneasy-making.

After things go wrong and Eladio slowly loses his grip, the action becomes increasingly surreal. Eladio has nightmares and hallucinations, and things take a turn to Overlook Hotel territory, but not really in a good way. At a certain point the pile-on of bad dreams and visions becomes confusing.

The wealthy landowner turns up near the end of the film to blame Eladio for everything that went bad, and for his greed; there is obviously a wealth of social/political/religious commentary underpinning these scenes. How much of it makes sense to North American audiences is hard to gauge. The Wait is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

The Wait. Written and directed by F. Javier Gutierrez. Starring Victor Clavijo, Pedro Casablanc, and Ruth Diaz. In theatres October 4.