No prizes for guessing that What the Waters Left Behind: Scars is a follow-up, to 2017’s What the Waters Left Behind. Or for guessing that it’s going to feature another gang of good-looking young people being given a maximally bad time in the same bleak, blasted evacuated city by some gnarly old guys. Torture porn they used to call this stuff back in the day.
The original was directed by the double-teaming Onetti brothers, Nicolás and Luciano, but it’s just Nicolás this time out. Luciano is still on board, supplying the atmospheric score that’s a key part of the film’s success. If you like this sort of thing, which I don’t particularly.
If torture porn is your cup of mechanically recovered meat, then you don’t even need to know the plot – but I’ll tell you that it focuses on a rock band on the road whose endless bitching with each other is interrupted when they are captured by some tatted and bearded old dudes. Physical and sexual abuse of the grimmest sort is soon being doled out in a dark dungeon to Javi, Mark, Jane, Billy Bob and Sophie, whose breasts – showcased in a barely-there red halter top – should probably get a supporting role designation.
The acting is very mixed and it’s obvious that Onetti isn’t really a people director. These same actors could surely give better performances than this, especially if they were speaking in their native languages – the bad guys speak Spanish, their victims English, regardless of how good they are at it (honestly, put the subtitles on if you have them). No matter, this is not really one for the acting awards. Instead – and here Onetti is good – it’s all about the atmosphere, starting with the remarkably striking village of Epecuén, a real place in Argentina that flooded when a dam broke in the mid-1980s and remained submerged for 25 years until the waters receded.
It’s against this haunting backdrop that the bulk of the film plays out, underground, where Paula Brasca’s Erika, a holdover from the first movie, is still incarcerated and being subjected to the whims of her captors when the new batch arrives.
Germán Baudino you might also remember from the first film, one of the brutes joining Tadeo (Mario Alarcón), Chimango (Chucho Fernández) and crew in doling out the atrocity. I’m giving them names, which is slightly to dignify what’s going on here, though Alarcón cuts through as the leader (possibly) of this tag tag team of butchers.
Agustin Olcese plays tour manager Javi, Clara Kovacic is lead singer/guitarist Jane, Matías Desiderio is drummer Billy Bob, Juan Pablo Bishel is bassist Mark while Maria Eugenia Rigón (she of the halter top) is Sophie, Mark’s girl. We hear two songs from the band, who are called The Ravens but they’re lip-syncing to Raven Black, an LA outfit of dark metallers. Good songs, though not for a second will you believe that Kovacic can summon that guttural growl from her slight frame.
It is in incidentals like the music that this film scores most of its points. The cinematography, by Luciano Montes de Oca, is also handsome, delivering high contrast colourscapes reminiscent of the cross-processing that used to go on in the 1980s – transparency film deliberately processed in colour-negative chemicals, or vice versa.
I forgot to mention Magui Bravi, a totemic figure for the Onettis. She’s been in a few of their films, as has Kovacic, including Abrakadabra, their remarkable giallo pastiche. Here she’s the honey in the trap designed to lure the band off the straight and narrow.
Magui’s spooky looks and curves straining against tight leather also deliver something to look at, and it’s at the level of “look” that this film works best. Thematically what’s going on – the young again being punished by the old? – maybe maybe. For all its faults – the acting, really – there’s something good going on here. More power to the elbows of the industrious Onettis, whose conveyor belt of horror will one day, surely deliver something to surpass 2018’s Abrakadabra, which I love. This, not so much.
What the Waters Left Behind: Scars – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
