Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Alejandro Hincapié, Camilo Machado, Alejandro Mendigana
Intro:
… a format-bending cinematic artwork ...
What happens when a film can’t be finished? Some resign those stillborn projects to the creator’s graveyard and begin anew (the vast unmade catalogue of Guillermo Del Toro). Others persist and push themselves to revive the corpse, unwilling to let that spent energy go to waste (Terry Gilliam’s odyssey trying to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote). Others still reflect on that act of fruitless endeavour and turn that experience into its own form of art (Dan Gilroy pouring his experiences working on Superman Lives into the art world satire Velvet Buzzsaw).
Theo Montoya’s Anhell69, an expansion of his 2020 short film Son of Sodom, opts for all three options simultaneously. It’s part-documentary, part-making of a film that never was, with Montoya holding casting calls amongst his friends within the Medellín Gay club scene for a dystopian sci-fi movie. But when Camilo Najar, whom Montoya was eyeing to play the lead, died from an overdose, that plan was immediately stopped.
And yet, in its own way, that film still got made. Montoya’s surreal depiction of a Medellín under the grip of a totalitarian government bent on ‘social cleansing’, while its citizens mingle with ghosts in an attempt to just feel something, is what comes out just from him filming the actual nightlife of this city. Through burning, moody colours, and a soundtrack equal parts ethereal and thumping, he shows a generation of Gay men whose only consistent father figure is the spectre of Pablo Escobar. A generation who recognises the cold hand of Death as a companion and maybe even a friend, amidst so many souls lost to neglect, vice, even hatred.
Montoya describes his unmade film, and by extension the one he completed, as a “trans film”, and while the visuals and personalities captured on-screen exhibit trans identity, it goes beyond mere transition into full-blown transcendence; transcendence from all boundaries, all binaries, and all conventional forms of cinematic storytelling. It’s as much a eulogy for lost souls, and even lost creativity, as it is about the feeling of being lost; of trying to find a place where we can simply be, knowing that the hearse will come for all of us one day (we can only hope that ours is also driven by Victor Gaviria).
It’s a mood piece so overwhelming, like a thick blanket made wholecloth from ennui, that it can be difficult to even fathom its existence at times; that a piece of media, let alone film, could be created that is this bleak, this nihilistic, and yet so life-affirming. A fable of the waking dead as they strut through a land where being able to find joy amongst the tombstones, to survive, is the most radical act there is.
In-between the talks of ‘spectrophiles’ (characters from the unmade film who have sex with ghosts) and the haunting drone shots of Medellín at night, there’s a vibrant emotional energy that does what film as an artistic ideal should do: define an experience that cannot simply be told to an audience… much as we have tried to do so here in this review.
Anhell69 is a funerary rager on film. It is a tribute to lives unlived, loves unsavoured, and stories untold. It’s a format-bending cinematic artwork that uses the uncertainty of existence and the absolute certainty of its end as raw fuel, creating an enveloping wash of loud colours and bright sounds that is as much about the struggles faced by the Gay community as it is about the beauty of their resilience. It’s the kind of film where it feels like something fundamental is altered within the self just through the act of witnessing it, like a booster shot of optimism delivered through an obsidian syringe. If you’re ever in the mood for a sobering but unforgettable viewing experience, look no further.
