"what color are my eyes?" - Tesis (1996)

"Me llamo Ángela. Me van a matar."

Whoever was responsible for the English subtitles on my rental copy of this movie, know that I am in your walls and I just want to talk, specifically on why said subtitles were both grammatically extremely dubious and also half in Spanish???

Anyway, spoilers etc. and so forth. Also content warning for a brief mention of suicide.

Tesis (1996)

Also known as: Thesis

Written and directed by: Alejandro Amenábar

Starring: Ana Torrent, Fele Martínez, Eduardo Noriega, Miguel Picazo, Xabier Elorriaga, et al.

Running time: 125 minutes

Original release date: 12 April 1996

the plot, in brief

November 1995. Ángela, a university student in Madrid, is preparing to write a thesis on audiovisual violence and the family. After asking her thesis director, Professor Figueroa, to assist her with finding the school library’s most violent films, she speaks to a fellow student named Chema, who has a reputation for collecting extreme cinema.

That evening, as Chema somewhat reluctantly introduces Ángela to the kind of movies he seeks out, Professor Figueroa scopes out the school’s audiovisual archives, and in the process finds a hidden tape. The following morning, Ángela searches for Figueroa and finds him in a screening room, dead of an apparent asthma attack, with the screen showing static. Ángela, fascinated by observing a dead body, secretly retrieves the tape from the scene.

At Chema’s house, Ángela discovers to her horror that the tape Figueroa died watching was a snuff film featuring a young woman being brutally tortured. Chema recognizes the woman as Vanessa, a fellow student who went missing two years prior. When Chema correctly deduces the type of camera used in the filming, he and Ángela are inadvertently drawn into the as yet unresolved case…

four things I really liked about Tesis (and also a small tangent about running time, why not)

the opening (aka Ángela’s commute)

The film begins with Ángela (Ana Torrent), on her commuter train to school. Her train has been stopped due to an incident on the tracks; a man committing suicide by jumping in front of the train. Passengers are evacuated off the train, and asked to leave the station single-file, against the wall, taking care not to look at the man’s body on the tracks.

I am not sure why the member of staff making the announcement felt it necessary to tell the commuters the man was basically cut in half, but it gives us a crucial bit of information about Ángela as, her curiosity piqued, she makes a move out of the line of presumably irate commuters and slowly walks up to the gaggle of spectators on the platform, staring down at the body of the man. She very nearly gets there, but is stopped by the police and politely asked to keep moving. She doesn’t see the man, we don’t see the man, but we see a glimpse into our main character, something which we build on in the next scene as we learn more about her thesis through her conversation with Professor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo) and her initial interaction with Chema (Fele Martínez).

the art of home decoration as a threat

Chema very reluctantly speaks to Ángela (the scene where they look at each other, from across the cafeteria, both with headphones in, her with soothing classical music and him with metal, is SO fucking good) and Ángela ends up coming to his flat (which is just full of weird and deeply sinister paraphernalia, almost like he’s decorated it as a threat) where he provides her with an example of the extreme cinema he’s got in his collection.

After Ángela discovers Figueroa dead in the screening room and takes the tape away, she watches it with Chema at his flat, and here he makes two extremely specific and very nerdy observations: one is that the footage of Vanessa, a fellow university student who disappeared two years prior, has been ever so subtly cut to blank out one key detail: that Vanessa knew who had kidnapped her, and was actively saying their name. The other? Through the grain on the film, Chema is able to determine the exact make of the camera that was used (he also has a catalogue of seemingly every camera made in the last five years, fucking superb work you little off-putting nerd): a specific model of Sony camera with a digital zoom feature.

Meanwhile, the supervision of Ángela’s thesis is taken over by Figueroa’s colleague, Professor Castro (Xabier Elorriaga),

Bosco cannot physically be anything other than sinister

In the cafeteria, Ángela happens to see this exact camera being used. On edge, she tries to glimpse the person who is using it and ends up in a chase across the school. The man with the camera is another student named Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), aka Handsome Squidward’s posh Spanish cousin.

For the rest of the film, Bosco will do things like turn up at Ángela’s house unexpectedly, stand in rooms just staring at her, go out with her sister for no reason, stand behind doors just staring at her and basically being unable to exist as anything other than a physical omen of bad things coming. And while Ángela and Bosco have a strange push and pull of attraction, it’s very clear that Bosco is not a good guy from the off. Nobody who goes to a party only to stand perfectly still in the middle of a room full of dancing people and stare daggers through your soul should be trusted!

Anyway, of course he’s the killer (I won’t spoil the winding road it takes to get to the solution, because I really do want you to watch this film and while it’s a long, tense affair, it’s worth it), and listening to him lay out in cold, forensic detail what he plans to do with Ángela will make you more than a little bit sick to your stomach.

the ending

So. Ángela, mistrusting of Chema and aware that Bosco’s ex-girlfriend Yolanda (Rosa Campillo) has called their house and threatened Ángela’s sister Sena (Nieves Herranz), goes to Bosco’s house. She’s followed there (in the pissing rain) by a figure in a black rain coat. As Ángela and Bosco heatedly talk about their relationship, the power goes out. Bosco goes to check but in a very effectively shot jump-scare, is knocked to the floor. When Ángela finds Bosco, unconcious, Chema steps out of the shadows, having followed her to the house. Bosco comes to and a fight breaks out between the two men, with Bosco beating Chema to the ground.

While Bosco goes to fetch a rope to tie Chema up, Chema whispers a faint “GARAGE” to Ángela, prompting her to go look inside and discover the ugly truth: the room seen in the tape featuring Vanessa is Bosco’s garage, and he’s about to do similarly heinous acts to Ángela.

However! Ángela is an absolute girlboss and uses the knife she’d previously grabbed in the kitchen to free herself while Bosco is giving his hideous villain monologue (in the process revealing that he’s killed Yolanda). She attacks Bosco, grabs his gun, and while he tries to distract her, Ángela shoots him dead, on tape, the perpetrator becoming the victim.

Later, Ángela goes to visit Chema in the hospital, as the news on TV informs us that the bodies of six women were found in Bosco’s garden. Ángela gives Chema a book, inscribed with an invitation to have coffee. As the news anchor on screen reveals that they are about to play part of Vanessa’s tape (WHY! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT), Chema rushes out of his hospital room and catches up with Ángela. The two walk slowly to the lifts, observing room after room of hospital patients with their eyes now trained on the TV screen, watching, waiting to see.

Ángela and Chema step into the lift. The news anchor introduces the tape. A warning screen pops up.

Cut to black. Credits.

as promised, a small tangent about running time, why not

As much as I genuinely liked Tesis - to the point where I would like to see it again soon to see if I’ve missed something (… like, with proper subtitles this time) - I do think that it would benefit hugely by being ever so slightly shorter. I may be alone in this, but I am of the belief that a horror film, even a slow-burn one, begins to strain within itself if the running time starts pushing against the two hour mark. I would argue that the way to clean up Tesis is to not reveal that Castro is in fact involved in the making of the snuff films until the final act, leaving Ángela to face off against both him and Bosco.

This leaves room for a potential strand of plot in which Castro does more to gain Ángela’s trust, allowing for the shock of him being involved to hit harder. It also allows for even more development in her dynamic with Chema - you could potentially go for a variation on the ending of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut even, with some minor edits made to how the ending pans out here.

Having said that, Tesis is a remarkably confident debut feature from Amenábar that attempts to get to the heart of what feels like a completely unanswerable question by way of his protagonist’s own thesis. The fact that Ángela eventually abandons said thesis suggests that maybe, after staring directly into the dark heart of man’s attraction to the spectacle of violence, she’d rather not delve any further.

a bit of housekeeping before we sign off

I am taking a two week break, as I am otherwise occupied the next two weekends! The Horror The Horror will be back on Sunday the 22nd of June, and will be on a slightly more sporadic schedule during the summer as I am also working on some other things and would quite like to not drive myself up the wall like I did last year. Got it? Good. See you in two weeks, sickos (/affectionate).