MANTICORE: Do Monsters Really Exist?

When we talk about monsters, we think about children’s fairy tales. Are they real? Or just children’s imagination? A manticore is a mythological creature that has the head of a human, the body of a lion and the tail of a dragon. It comes from ancient Greek, where it meant tiger or “man-eater”. Julián (Nacho Sánchez), the main character in Manticore, claims that he wanted to be a tiger when he was a child. Is this telling us in a subtle way that Julián is a monster?

Virtual reality to satisfy dark desires

Julián is a successful video game designer. He is quiet, shy, and very introverted. He lives in the center of Madrid and doesn’t have a hectic social life. He just has one friend from work. He doesn’t like traveling. He is young and lonely. He works from home and spends the weekends working, creating 3D monster creatures – terrifying for others, but beautiful and captivating for him.

It’s precisely one day when he is working at home, when he hears some shouts from the house next door. There is a fire in his neighbor’s house and a kid, Cristian (Álvaro Sanz Rodríguez), is trapped. Julián manages to open the door and saves the little kid. He has just become a hero. However, that same night, Julián starts experiencing anxiety attacks.

When he meets Diana (Zoe Stein), a young woman with a childish look who takes care of her sick father, he starts believing that he might have an opportunity to be happy. Julián has a dark secret: after the fire, he started feeling attracted to Cristian. An instinct he can’t share and that he constantly fights. He moves out of his house to be far away from Cristian but the disturbing thought keeps haunting him.

Carlos Vermut, the director of Manticore, once again touches delicate territory in his new film, which is treated like a drama but with elements of suspense. In Magical Girl, he also treated dark topics such as terminal illnesses, abuse and toxic relationships. In Stockholm, he talked about depression, suicide and self-harm. In Manticore, he opens up an interesting debate about pedophilia using Julián’s profession to ask the audience the following question: is virtual reality a way to unburden the dark impulses that are forbidden in reality?

Naturalism to minimize the tension

Carlos Vermut, big fan and follower of Woody Allen, uses naturalism to decrease the creepiness of the story. We find ourselves following the characters through the empty summer streets of Madrid: their conversations while walking the “Paseo de Recoletos”, their visit to the Prado museum, the “Filmoteca Española” where Diana watches a film and Julián spies on her. This reminds us very much of Isaac (Woody Allen) and Mary (Diane Keaton) falling in love through the beautiful spots portrayed in Manhattan. It’s clear that Carlos Vermut is from Madrid since he also shows hidden corners that only someone from Madrid would recognize. The characters getting to know each other and meeting all around Madrid in the first part of the film transmit a certain lightness to this troubling story and allow us to breathe in between scenes.

When Julián and Diana visit the Prado museum, they stop to look at the famous Saturn Devouring His Son painting from the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. The work, which is one of the so-called Black Paintings, shows us another monster: Saturn, god of time, who devoured his children as they were born. Goya painted a mythological story that depicts the terrible moment when Saturn rips and swallows one of his children. Mythology is very important in Manticore to refer to the monsters that hide beneath the film’s surface.

While, at the beginning of the film, the naturalism and the love story reduce tension, there are some shots that maximize it. A specific one comes to mind – when Julián buzzes Cristian in the entryphone to persuade him to open the door. The camera was placed on the other side of the door, so you can just see part of Julián’s face. Even if Julián has never hurt anyone, this kind of camera angle is kind of unsettling and reminds of the nadir shot of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho.

Is Julián a monster with a human body?

The director asked the following question in an interview in Fotogramas, a Spanish film magazine: “To what extent can we judge someone for carrying out illegal acts in the privacy of their virtual reality headset, in a universe that is not real?” Carlos Vermut is really compassionate towards his characters to the point in which the viewers become compassionate for them too. He touches, in a delicate manner, topics that make us feel uncomfortable, posing extreme situations. This troubling and unsettling plot allows us to ask ourselves the question that he asked in that same interview and that he poses during the movie. Who are we to judge Julián? A person who knows how troubled he is and that has never hurt a child? It’s a difficult movie to recommend to others. But I just can’t stop recommending it.

Manticore (Mantícora in Spanish) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022 and was also screened at the Fantastic Fest (USA) in September 2022 and at the Sitges film festival (Spain) in October 2022. It was released in cinemas in Spain in December 2022 and has no release date in US cinemas just yet.

Watch Manticore