Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar is best known for 2001’s The Others (which I’ll get to in November), but his Masterwork is also his feature debut. Thesis is about a college student researching the effect of watching violence depicted in films. She’s looking at why someone would choose to show it, the people who are always casually interested in such images and the ones who make it a hobby to seek out the extreme. Her investigation leads her to people obsessed with Horror films (relatable) and eventually to that modern urban legend, the snuff film.
Despite the subject matter, the film is very light on gore, often getting us worked up that we’re about to see something horrible only to cut away, usually to Angela’s reaction. Angela starts from purely an academic perspective, but as she goes further down the rabbit hole she also becomes fascinated by what she might see. The film plays with our own desire, but keeps on an intelligent and safe viewpoint through to the incredible final scene that directly brings in an audience and gauges their interest along with our own.
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