WFF '23: Manticore

The Wisconsin Film Festival program's description of Manticore promised a descent into the darker recesses of the human mind and the movie certainly delivered.

Classically, the manticore was a creature with the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a scorpion. It represented danger, evil, and the unknown. Turns out to be the perfect metaphor here.

We are introduced to Julián, a video game artist who is designing a nasty beast as his latest assignment. As he works one day, he hears someone calling for help. He investigates and finds that there is a fire in a neighbor's apartment and that a boy trapped inside. Julián grabs a fire extinguisher, busts open the door, and puts the fire out. The boy, Cristian, is saved.

Julián becomes unnaturally preoccupied with the boy, first sketching him by hand and then creating a 3D model of the kid using the same modeling software that he utilizes in creating the creatures for video games.

Our protagonist takes a turn towards the pathetic here. We see him act bravely at the movie's opening but he becomes indecisive, meek, and emasculated, if you will, as he is unable to perform in bed with a woman he picks up at a club.

At a party for a co-worker, Julián meets an art history student named Diana and he finds himself smitten. Diana has a boyish haircut, interestingly enough. Along this same line, Julián, played by Nacho Sánchez, has big eyes which brought Peter Lorre's Hans Beckert in M to mind. Their fondness for one another grows as Julián wrestles with his attraction to Cristian.

I liked how director Carlos Vermut alluded to the darkness within Julián. For instance, he and Diana go see Goya's dark, intense Black Paintings and we get a close-up of Saturn Devouring His Son. And his work creating a nasty beast for a video game continues apace. 

When he meets Diana, he explains his occupation to her and she asks if he creates models of people. He replies that he does not because everyone knows what people look like but no one knows what monsters and demons look like so he can get away without having to adhere to preconceptions of appearance. Here Vermut asks us to think about what we see in Julián.

Vermut takes things at a deliberate pace here. He has Julián slowly stew in his forbidden urges and he lets Julián's relationship with Diana unfold in an almost languid manner. This creates a low level suspense in the background that the audience just cannot escape as we ponder what Julián will do. What, if any, desire will he act on?

I found Manticore to be an intriguing and quite disturbing character sketch. Did Julián gaze into the abyss for too long? Perhaps he came out of the womb with a black stain on his soul. Vermut leaves it you to figure out.