Country: Spain
Genre: Suspense
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Year: 1996
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Tesis works on two levels: as an American style thriller about a snuff film ring, and as an implicit criticism of the torture porn trend before it even existed.
Angela (Ana Torrent) is working on a thesis about violence in the media when she stumbles across a snuff film.
Writer/director Alejandro Amenabar plays with the audience’s preconceptions about what kind of personality signals aberrant behavior. Is the killer Chema (Fele Martínez), a goth dude who dresses in black and is obsessed with pornos and Faces Of Death type videos? (That would be one socially conservative choice. A variant of that is having a sociopath be the most intelligent, cultured person in the movie — that happens alot in Hollywood movies.) Or could it be Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), a handsome, self-confident, well-dressed young man? Or maybe it’s Professor Castro (Xabier Elorriaga), Angela’s new thesis instructor? (Those would be the more liberal choices.) Or maybe it’s all of them…or none of them.
Writer/director Alejandro Amenábar has seen enough films to know how to manipulate the narrative to first make you suspect one person, then another, and then another, jerking your chain around, which is a big part of the point of a film like this. This kind of mechanical suspense predominates in the last half of the film, and while it’s diverting, is not as interesting as the other game Amenábar is playing.
At one point, he has Professor Castro pontificate to his class about the failure of Spain’s domestic film industry, saying in effect, that you have to give the people what they want if you want to compete with Hollywood. You know, lots of explosions and mindless violence. Angela tells Castro that she doesn’t like violence. When he asks her if she think all movies should be censored, she tells him that if a director is going to use violence, he should know exactly why.
In other words, Amenábar is telling us through Angela that artists have to make a responsible use of violence in the service of art, not merely to pander to the basest instincts of an increasingly debased population. Of course, a snuff film is the ultimate example of this. There is no art. It’s just a video camera pointed at an atrocity, which makes it easy for the viewer to insert himself into the scene in order to vicariously participate in the sick acts depicted. Pornography, in other words. Once you add subjective lighting, sound, and camera movement you are commenting on the acts depicted, which is a fundamentally different proposition.
It’s actually a pretty brilliant critique, if you ask me.
But don’t get me wrong. Tesis is hardly didactic. The cultural criticism is there if you want to enjoy it. If you prefer a brain dead thriller, Tesis functions reasonably well in that capacity, too.
Alejandro Amenábar is expert at employing the tools of the trade to generate suspense, such as subjective sound, lighting, off center camera placement, and so on. He also practices what he preaches. There is almost zero graphic violence in the picture. In fact, in what should be the “money shot,” Amenábar cuts to a video camera point of view so that we are deprived of the gore we were expecting.
But in Tesis, Amenábar doesn’t just deprive the viewer of the standard blood and guts — he provides something more interesting and intellectually nourishing in their place.
