Manticore takes its name from the mythical beast with the head of a man, the body of a lion and the tail of a scorpion. But writer/director Carlos Vermut has another beast in mind – two, in fact – in this Spanish film giving us a flash of what it’s about before lulling us into a state of forgetfulness until coming back hard and horrible in its final moments.
Nacho Sánchez plays Julián, a Madrid “monster modeller” who does all the mythical beasts for the video game company he works for. At home one day applying a horn, or some scales, to his latest 3D image, he hears cries from a neighbouring apartment, realises it’s on fire and breaks the door down to save Cristian, the young lad trapped behind the locked front door.
Julián is a hero, to young Cristian (Álvaro Sanz), Cristian’s mother (Ángela Boix) and to anyone watching this film, which then lets us into his little secret – Julián is sexually excited by the thought of Cristian, who he starts to use as a life model for the various Non-Player Characters that do for games what extras do for films.
From here Vermut takes us on quite a journey, with Julián – prone to panic attacks, painfully standoffish – and with Diana (Zoe Stein), the young woman he meets at a party and with whom he starts to form a relationship, one that’s so cute and languidly drawn that we forget Julián’s secret, even though Vermut gives us little nudges. Like the day out Julián and Diana have at the beginning of their still-tentative relationship, when they visit the Prado Museum and look at the Black Paintings by Francisco Goya, his late-life depictions of haunted, tortured humanity.
The DP on Manticore, Alana Mejía González, shoots the whole film like one of Goya’s dark and shadowy Black Paintings. But Vermut says he was also inspired to make the film by the myth of the werewolf, the tragic story of the human being who’s not bestial at all until, out of nowhere, he suddenly is.
Like the paedophile tendencies, Vermut buries all of this so far in the undergrowth that it’s possible to sail right through this film without spotting the werewolf connection – there are no hairy hands or fangs – and get caught up instead in the story of a man who looks like he’s going to be redeemed by love.
Don’t get your hopes up, and I’m being cagey about what happens because you want to watch this film (and you really do want to watch it) for the way it plays with our sympathies. Suffice to say that Diana, also, has a little fault, a foible, one that won’t be revealed until things have really gone to the dark side for Julián.
Are impulses that aren’t acted on to be treated the same as those that are? The recent film Sparta asked something similar and came up with a similarly compassionate answer. But there is another knot which Vermut worries away at. After an inappropriate drawing Julián did of Cristian comes to light, one which appals Diana, his defence is that “the drawing is not real”. It obvously isn’t. But it might be indicative of something. Diana clearly thinks it is. Or it might help create an ennabling atmosphere for someone like Julián. And here, in the 21st century, the old notion of vice rears its head.
It’s hard to understand what the beautiful, intelligent and engaged Diana sees in the mopey, withdrawn Julián. Maybe he smells nice but he doesn’t look like he washes that much. Either way Zoe Stein is the standout in this strange drama, a bubbling presence against the necessarily remote performance by Sánchez, who does manage to make Julián the tragic hero rather than a monster manqué.
The film is entirely compelling, partly on account of the hare that Vermut sets running with his early revelation, but also because of the way it’s made. There is an ineffable quality to the cinematography, the acting and the the pacing. The film wraps us up in the world of Julián. He may not be someone we’d like to know but we are on his side. The poor guy is cursed, afflicted. A beast from legend, or even one of his own games.
Manticore – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
