My notes on Embrión (Embryo)
Snowdevil Mountain in Chile – a spectacular location – is apparently South America’s Roswell, known for repeated UFO sightings and alien abductions. Director Patricio Valladares, who co-wrote with Barry Keating, weaves together three purportedly authentic (if far-fetched) cases into one brief, hallucinatory picture.
The main thread follows tourist Evelyn (Romina Perazzo), who is separated from her boyfriend Kevin (Domingo Guzman) for a few hours and returns disoriented, with a new-found compulsion to eat people’s guts … which leads to her cutting a swath through some local louts, and making her way into the woods for a rendezvous with something clawed. Inset are stories about a disastrous film shoot and a found footage collage that climaxes with a family’s abduction after their child has repeatedly drawn aliens also feature, drawn together by the figure of an obsessed cop (Cristian Cuentrejo) who has a personal reason to investigate these Fortean cases.
Though it shares some Lovecraftian (him again) preoccupations with Valladares’ previous Downhill, this plays with a lot of UFOlogical lore (and features X-Filesy date, time and place captions to set the genre tone) but also has much in common with ‘unnatural pregnancy’ horrors like Inseminoid and Baby Blood. It has gruesome moments, but also flashes of sweetness and cosmic horror.
Discussion
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