Amat Escalante

Lost in the Night

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Emiliano and Mónica lying down together

A thriller done without the genre defaults, Lost in the Night (Perdidos en la Noche) is a film by Amat Escalante, a director who likes it bright and wide, slow and considered – more or less the opposite of the usual dark, claustrophobic, rapid and kneejerk. Does it work? No, but it’s a near miss rather than a catastrophic fail, an ambitious film pushing the genre in an unusual direction, and at its centre a loner’s performance by Juan Daniel García Treviño, playing a Mexican teenager trying to find out what happened to his political activist mother three years earlier. His investigation takes him to the home of the Aldama family, a strange … Read more

The Untamed

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Ruth Ramos as Alejandra

Genre collision is the dish of the day in The Untamed (La Région Salvaje) as the most down-to-earth drama, the soap, meets the most out there – sci-fi. The result probably shouldn’t work but it really does, thanks to writer director Amat Escalante’s decision to keep the sci-fi stuff in the background for most of the film. After an opening shot of a black meteorite in space, followed by one of a pretty young woman apparently pleasuring herself, or being pleasured by, a giant pink tentacle, we’re off into an entirely different realm until, in the film’s last section, the tentacle, and the creature it’s attached to, return for some very out-there cross … Read more