Satanás
Satan / Satanás - Profile of a Killer

Colombia/Mexico 2007
produced by
Rodrigo Guerrero, Ilan Arboleda (executive), Andres Calderon (executive), Jaime Osorio Gómez (executive) for Proyecto Tucan, Rio Negro
directed by Andrés Baiz
starring Damián Alcázar, Blas Jaramillo, Marcela Mar, Marcela Valencia, Isabel Gaona, Teresa Gutiérrez, Andrés Parra, Diego Vásquez, Vicky Hernández, Clara Samper, Patricia Castaneda, María Cecilia Sánchez, Hernán Méndez, Héctor García, Fabio Restrepo, Marcela Gallego, Inés Correa, Carlos Alberto Jiménez, Álvaro García, Carlos Gutiérrez, César Badillo, Gerónimo Basile, Javier Gardeazábal, Valentina Gómez, Fernando García, Didier van der Hove, Fanny Baena, Mauricio Fuentes, Lucas Jaramillo, Carolina Gaitan, Rodribo Trujillo, Ángela Pineda
screenplay by Andrés Baiz, based on the novel by Mario Mendoza, music by Angelo Milli

review by
Mike Haberfelner

A woman (Marcela Valencia) asks priest father Ernesto (Blas Jaramillo) for advice because she can't feed her children anymore. He goes and buys some food for the kids, but when he returns she has already killed them. This and the fact that the woman later tries to seduce him when he visits her in prison makes the priest rethink his vocation ... and ultimately, he confesses his love to his assistant Irene (Isabel Gaona), quits priesthood, and looks forward to a bright future with Irene at his side.

Paola (Marcela Mar) is a simple coffee vendor at the market, but two crooks (Andrés Parra, Diego Vásquez) come to the conclusion that she is too pretty to be just that, and they make her the bait in their plan to drug and rob rich customers at a bar. This goes well for a while, but then Paola gets into the wrong cab and the guys running the taxi rob and rape her, just as if her sins came back to haunt her. Paola uses her contacts to the crime world to have the guys executed, then though she quits her job as bait and starts working as a waitress at a fancy restaurant.

War veteran and English tutor Eliseo (Damián Alcázar) has fallen in love with one of his students, lovely Natalia (Martina García), but while she's fond of him, she doesn't love him back and on top of that alreadey has a boyfriend. This though is only the latest (and most hurtful) in a long series of rejections Eliseo has experienced of late, but also the last straw, because now he arms himself, goes over to Natalia's house to kill her and her mother (Marcela Gallego), kills his own mother (Teresa Gutiérrez) whom he still lives with and a bunch of neighbours.

In the finale, he pays a visit to the restaurant Paola is working at and Ernesto and Irene are having their dinner to kill pretty much everyone in sight.

If world cinema was a genre, Satanás would have pinned the formula down to the letter: Just tell a few stories that have nothing to do with each other parallel to each other, throw in something about the church with horror elements (Ernesto's story), a seedy crime story preferably with a rape (Paola's story) and of course a reference to an American filmmaker like Martin Scorsese (Eliseo's story is a very thinly disguised retelling of Taxi Driver), and to cover up the fact that this is actually an anthology movie, tie the three films up in an ending that includes all the main characters, in the form of a killing spree if you can't think of anything better.

The problem of Satanás though is not so much that it is formulaic as can be, but that it remains terribly bland throughout, director Andrés Baiz never manages to really involve the audinece with the characters and their problems, sympathize with the characters even (and that's not the actors' fault by the way). On top of that the three stories the film tells are rather simplistic and lack any real depth, they are not all that well interwoven with each other and don't really share motives that would justify them to be in the same film, and the ending that is supposed to tie them up and tie them together seems nothing but forced upon and is almost a little pathetic.

All that said, Satanás is not the worst film ever brought to the screen, it's just disappointingly mediocre.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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