THE UNTAMED: An Outstanding Marriage Of Realist Drama And Sci-Fi Horror

The Untamed opens on a meteor floating in space.

Then we see a woman who appears to be making love with a tentacle.

And things only get stranger from there…

The Untamed

Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) and Ángel (Jesús Meza) are an unhappily married couple living in a small town in Mexico with their two young sons. Unbeknownst to Alejandra, Ángel is having an affair with her brother Fabián (Eden Villavicencio), who works as a nurse in their local hospital.

It is at the hospital where Fabián meets Verónica (Simone Bucio), who comes in with mysterious injuries that she claims are dog bites. Fabián and Verónica soon become friends, and bond over their complicated love lives, one of them being far more complicated than the other. When Verónica introduces her new friend to her ‘lover’, life changes for all four of our central characters in ways they could never have imagined.

Social Issues

Before we get to the creature at the heart of The Untamed, its worth spending some time on the movie’s more quotidian central drama.

Two stories from a small-town Mexican newspaper inspired writer-director Amat Escalante to make this film. The first was about a woman who narrowly escaped a rapist and was subsequently branded a ‘slut’ by the people in her village. The other was of a gay man found dead in a stream. The headline of that story read: ‘Faggot Is Found Drowned’. The Untamed grew from Escalante’s horror at the inhuman treatment of these two people, and these conservative attitudes towards sex, and homophobia are examined throughout this film.

Even more than homophobia, the shame around sex permeates everything. It’s no accident that this creature who provides sexual satisfaction to three of our four main characters is hidden away, far out of town. And it’s no accident that this creature kills so many of the people it has intercourse with. It’s another portrayal of this conservative thinking, albeit a more extreme example – sex is dangerous, it could even kill you.

The central cast are all relative newcomers to film, and all give engaging, heartfelt performances, the two women in particular. Simone Bucio, in her very first cinematic role, is almost as otherworldly as the creature. And Ruth Ramos is deeply affecting as a woman whose life just keeps getting worse, until the creature gives her some much-needed relief. The friendship of Alejandra and Verónica, as unusual as it may be, gives the film a terrestrial grounding.

Escalante and Gibrán Portela’s screenplay works hard to flesh out each of the four lead characters. In keeping with the rest of the film, much of their histories remain mysterious. But we learn enough about each to inspire empathy, even for Ángel, whose thoughtless and cruel actions often make him seem repellent. Living with those parents of his cannot have been easy.

The drama, and strange love square between these four people would have stood alone as a satisfying film. That a mysterious creature from outer space is then added to the mix, and that the alien is a perfect tonal fit with the earth-bound drama is what makes The Untamed an astonishing movie.

La Región Salvaje

The original Spanish-language title for The Untamed is La Región Salvaje, or The Wild Region. It is there that we find the creature.

The domestic drama section of this film takes place in a built up urban area; within houses, hospitals, busy streets and night clubs. The creature has set up shop far outside, in a smallholding owned by a mysterious older couple, surrounded by a bucolic, picture-perfect area with grazing goats and a peaceful stream. It’s not the sort of place you’d imagine playing host to a creature from outer space. As our characters disappear from this idyll into the creature’s lair, it is filmed similarly to the disappearance of the girls in Picnic At Hanging Rock. They walk as though they are being called by something unearthly (which of course, they are).

Though we see a tentacle in the film’s opening moments, it isn’t until two-thirds of the way through that the alien is revealed in its entirety. It’s worth the wait. The best way to describe it would be an octopus, but instead of eight legs, it has eight, almost comically phallic protuberances. It’s grotesque, but striking, goopy but beautiful; a creature that can cause great pleasure, or great pain, for reasons indecipherable to human beings.

Escalante and cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro (a frequent collaborator of Lars Von Trier) create some truly arresting imagery to accompany the creature’s bizarre existence. The one time we get to see it in ‘action’, so to speak, is a stunning moment in both senses of the word. What you are seeing is so intimate, it feels wrong to be watching, but you can’t look away. It’s hard to imagine how they pulled it off practically. The same can be said for an earlier scene, which features a great variety of animals *doing their thing* in the crater left behind by the meteorite.  Praise should be lavished on the visual effects teams at Ghost VFX and The Gentleman Broncos for creating such wild, yet realistic-appearing images. They really are staggering.

From its reason for arriving on earth, to its decisions to either kill or caress, everything about the alien visitor is shrouded in mystery. What tests are this elder couple doing on the creature? Why is Verónica recruiting people to come and visit it when she knows the dangers in store? Are there more creatures on the way?

Far from frustrating, it is The Untamed‘s resolute lack of answers that make it so beguiling. If one hundred people were to watch, they’d come away with one hundred different interpretations of what it all means. Amat Escalante knows just how much information to give the viewer to keep the mystery thrumming around in their head.

In Conclusion

Whilst The Untamed will be remembered for its more outlandish elements, what makes it such a compelling film is how it marries them to the domestic drama. Helped by four fantastic performances, and enhanced even further by the thoughtful screenplay, the worldly story is so engaging that the uncanny is almost unnecessary.

It is within this realm of the uncanny though, where the movie finds its most indelible imagery. Some of these scenes are stupefying, some just beggar belief. In fact, The Untamed, as a whole, is one of those films that needs to be seen to be believed. And once you’ve seen it, you won’t forget it.

Have you seen The Untamed? What did you think?

The Untamed is released in the UK on Blu-Ray and DVD on October 9th. For further release information, click here.