My notes on Forgiveness
In a prologue, three battered women have hogtied a guy we instinctively no to be their abuser (Andres de la Mora) are found by the trussed-up whiner’s gangster-type father (Horacio Castelo), who promises retribution. Then, in three faux single-take chapters, we follow the three women as they wake up respectively deaf, dumb and blind in a sinister hospital – though the premise is hard to follow since the bulk of the film is dialogue-free so all the women are without speech (I’m not even sure if the situation actually matches the blurb – I didn’t clock that which of the trio was deaf, and all of them have been robbed of a voice). Also, the blind woman has a zapping optical effect superpower that doesn’t help much in the long run – she never even tries to use it on the main villains, after seeing off some minor thugs with it. This is the sort of film that has cast list credits for ‘Rapist 1’, ‘Rapist 2’, ‘Rapist 3’, ‘Trafficking Victim 1’, etc – and it’s a throwback to the sort of grimy, miserable exercise in abuse and hopelessness the genre overdosed on circa 2015.
Magnea (Jessica Ortiz), Aisha (Alejandra Zaid) and Camila (Alejandra Toussaint) spend the whole film running around hospital corridors pursued by the leather-jacketed evil Man With Glasses (Albert Trujillo), an evil matron (Laura de Ita) who forces Magnea and Camila to make a lesbian porn video, an evil machete man (Diego Garza), a couple of vampire nurses, rapists in those overused animal masks, and the Boss, who finally gets dialogue (in English) in an epilogue that doesn’t join all the dots. The follow-cam keeps up with the actresses as they jog upstairs and writer-director Alex Kahuam stages a few nice little tricks with figures who are caught briefly by the camera but not there when it pans back – but compare this with Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes to see what can really be done with this device. Like Antidote, this combines the are-they-in-hell? and evil-hospital sub-genres – though this goes for more of a how-much-abuse-can-you-take effect.
Here’s the Frightfest listing.
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