★★☆☆☆ Whilst Jordi Cadena's The Fear (2013) boasts a sensational performance from young talent Igor Szpakowski and a palpable sense of dread, this oppressive meditation on Spain's 'pact of forgetting' and Basque separatism ultimately proves an insensitive and tactless exploration of domestic violence. Shot almost entirely from the vantage point of teenager Manel (Szpakowski), we observe the effects of a brutal patriarch over a frail and helpless family. Cadena uses an abundance of extreme close-ups to express this suffocating malevolence, only withdrawing when Manel and his kid sister are safe at school.
Drawing parallels with 1973's The Spirit of the Beehive, The Fear offers up a plethora of lazy metaphors that mirror the allegorical films produced in Franco's Spain - with the father merely an emblematic representation of the country's past. This monstrosity could have been used to represent the paternal stronghold on Western society, where authority is asserted through fear and masculine dominance,...
Drawing parallels with 1973's The Spirit of the Beehive, The Fear offers up a plethora of lazy metaphors that mirror the allegorical films produced in Franco's Spain - with the father merely an emblematic representation of the country's past. This monstrosity could have been used to represent the paternal stronghold on Western society, where authority is asserted through fear and masculine dominance,...
- 10/10/2013
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
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