A baroque apocalypse thriller and, in case it’s getting too existential for you, Before the Fall (originally Tres Diás) also adds a dab of serial-killer angst for good measure. This feature debut by director F Javier Gutiérrez made a big splash when it came out in 2008 and then quietly disappeared.
Arriving three years before Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, it seems at first to ask the same question: how would you react to the news of an impending apocalypse? Alejandro (Victor Clavijo), living with his mother, is a disgruntled handyman who learns one day via TV bulletin that the world will end in three days. A gigantic meteor will eradicate any possibility of any human life surviving, the announcer says. Outside, people are already panicking. Satellites and planes are falling from the sky as a result of the disturbance in the gravitational field caused by the meteor’s proximity. Inside, Ale has decided this is his cue to grab a beer from the fridge. He’s going to spend the last few days of his life drunk.
But not if his mother has anything to do with it. Heading into the hills to visit family, and dragging Ale with her, she discovers her other son’s children are out there all alone. They have no idea where their parents are or what’s coming their way, a situation Rosa (Mariana Cordero) doubles down on by “accidentally” breaking their transistor radio, the only means of receiving information from the outside world.
And there we have it, what looks like an examination of various reactions to impending tragedy – fatalism or fantasy. Ale drinking, Rosa pretending it’s not going to happen, and four kids wondering why their grandma and uncle are acting weirdly.
On top of all that, into the off-whack Garden of Eden comes a left-field storyline about the region’s most feared criminal, Soro (Eduard Fernández), turning up. Soro is a friend of Ale’s brother, he tells him. But instead of leaving when he learns that Tomás is not there, Soro settles down in his car out in the sweltering heat. He’ll wait for Tomás, he says. Ale is entirely aware who this smiling man claiming to be Lucio really is.
It’s a strange mix and Gutiérrez approaches it in a strange way, doing whole screeds of the movie in a frenzied, fast-cutting, lurching style with ants in its pants before settling down to something more considered and well paced.
The contrast between the tranquility of this remote location and the lurking threat – from the sky and from the guy – makes for a proper dramatic dynamic. The sense of escalating paranoia held at bay is caught brilliantly in all the performances, especially once Soro realises that the kids don’t have any clue about what’s coming their way and starts to exploit that for his own murderous ends.
By the time it winds into the closing straight, we’re a very long way from the film’s opening position, in quite another film entirely really, though Gutiérrez has got us there gobbet by digestible gobbet, with loads of atmosphere and a nimble balancing of inner (to lose one’s shit or not) and outer (Soro and/or the comet) jeopardy.
By the very end, in the film’s last few scenes, Gutiérrez and co-writer Juan Velarde have flipped things yet again, almost-but-not-quite into another genre, with the arrival of a pregnant young woman on the scene for some very late-in-the-day death-and-glory romance.
A peculiar film, thick with flavour, not entirely great but frequently so, with a concluding act that is fraught as hell, before a payoff that is strange yet satisfying.
Antonio Banderas produced this movie and you can see what he saw in it. So what happened to the US remake that was mooted at some point? Wes Craven said he wanted to direct it. Nada…
Before the Fall – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
