Death Becomes Him
Génesis
Starring Pep Tosar and Trae Houlihan
Written and directed by Nacho Cerdà
Unearthed Films
Nacho Cerdà’s third installment in his thematically linked trilogy of “death” shorts premiered in North America at the Fantasia Film Festival in 1998 to a stunned crowd. Viewers expecting the kind of undignified, necrophilic trauma that Aftermath (1994) offered were instead subject to thirty minutes of different kind of trauma – that of intense emotional suffering and the depth of human desperation – far less bloody, but no less profound.
Cerdà’s first film The Awakening (1990) explores the first step in the process of dying – actual physical death – and Aftermath, as extreme an example, deals with the painful reality of what happens to the body after death. But Génesis (as its title would suggest) isn’t so much about dying as it is about living, or rather, living after death.
Veteran theatre actor Pep Tosar – his appearance deliberately altered to not be equated with the depraved corpse-defiler from Aftermath – stars as an anguished sculptor who loses his wife in a terrible accident. Shortly after he carves a beautiful effigy of her, she begins to bleed from a mysterious wound below her left clavicle. The sculptor, in his desperation to give her life, begins to open wounds on his own body in an abstract attempt to offer his life for hers. As she begins to take on characteristics of the living, the artist slowly decays.
This is Cerdà at his most thoughtful, exploring the mystery of life after death. Now available on DVD for the first time as an extra on Unearthed Films’ release of Aftermath, Génesis is a touching metaphysical love story about a truly tortured soul that carves right into the heart. It functions as an esoteric companion to the harsh realism of Aftermath and is also the filmmaker’s most visually poetic effort to date. Like Cerdà’s other work, Génesis is completely devoid of dialogue; instead, it’s dressed with a rich body of moving classical music powerful enough to draw tears. A truly eerie and beautiful silent film that speaks volumes.
Jovanka Vuckovic