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'The Unknown': The strange seduction of discomfort around teenage cyberbullying

2023-06-09T05:18:50.084Z

Highlights: Pablo Maqueda adapts the work of Paco Bezerra with less sociopolitical load and greater sense of spectacle: that of the suggestion of surprise. The Unknown is a macabre game of capture and deception full of script revolts, starring this time by Manolo Solo and Laia Manzanares. An enigma focused on paraphilias that, with a changing structure, holds up much better in its first half than in the second. The encounter in a park between a dark and talkative mature man and a shy 16-year-old girl reveals a tour de force.


Pablo Maqueda adapts the work of Paco Bezerra with less sociopolitical load and greater sense of spectacle: that of the suggestion of surprise


The seduction of discomfort in cinema. That feeling that does not like too many, but that we are passionate about a few. Feeling unbalanced, and at the same time concerned, by a theme, attitudes and subtexts outside the logic of reason, although within the complexity of the human being and our society. There was Grooming, a play by Paco Bezerra around cyberbullying of minors, premiered in 2012 directed by José Luis Gómez and interpreted by Antonio de la Torre and Nausicaa Bonnín. And there returns a decade later Pablo Maqueda, who together with Bezerra himself and Haizea G. Viana has adapted the work to turn it into The Unknown, a macabre game of capture and deception full of script revolts, starring this time by Manolo Solo and Laia Manzanares.

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The cultural and political circumstances that have surrounded Bezerra say a lot about his work and, of course, about a film like The Unknown. The Almeria playwright had been awarded the National Prize for Dramatic Literature in 2008 for another work, Inside the earth, and already then denounced the difficulty for theaters to represent his pieces, despite the awards and prestige achieved (he had also been a finalist of the Romero Esteo). In fact, he was awarded the national without any of his texts having yet been mounted on the stages, an anomaly that was confirmed with subsequent successes and controversies, culminating in the withdrawal at the wrong time from the theatrical programming of last year in the community of Madrid of another of his works: I die because I do not die, about Saint Teresa of Jesus.

Anyway, and despite the figure of Bezerra, The Stranger arrives in theaters with another halo, with less sociopolitical charge and greater sense of spectacle: that of the suggestion of surprise, that of seeing something different, exciting and even dangerous, which must not be revealed at the exit. Any issue related to gutting has become in recent years an exaggeration and a boredom. And yet audiences love to echo it, whether it's clamoring for their respect or ranting about their purported importance. Thus, the film opens with a warning about the need not to reveal its turns, with a strategy that has much more to do with what William Castle and Alfred Hitchcock did in their day than with the trifles of spoilers in superhero blockbusters.

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Read the film reviews

In his fourth feature film, Maqueda has composed a story very clean in its image that, however, reveals a disturbing universe of sordidness and secrecy. An enigma focused on paraphilias that, with a changing structure, holds up much better in its first half than in the second. The encounter in a park between a dark and talkative mature man and a shy 16-year-old girl reveals a tour de force that, in the manner of whiter titles (The footprint could be the paradigm), establishes in appearance and deception the secret of its success. The films of Carlos Vermut and Michael Haneke, and even the nuances of modern fable of Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005), with those parallels with the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the explicit references in the text to Alice in Wonderland, seem to have inspired Maqueda in his concept, with off-field in sex and a grayish photograph with minimal depth by Santiago Racaj. But among the rabbits taken from the burrow (or hat), some are more interesting than others. Annoying (for good), threatening and terrifying until the essential first great turn, The Stranger is, on the other hand, much less accurate and transcendent in its second stretch, when the female character takes the reins.

The wolf as a normal guy with cheap suit, dark circles and belly, speaking with the absolute spontaneity of the excellent Manolo Solo, produces chills. However, in the game of perversion and power that dominates the last story, the intolerable does not just emerge. The uneasiness caused, for example, by the final development of another fiction, a great novel that also fits into the vile universe of pedophilia: Cara de pan, by Sara Mesa.

The Unknown

Address: Pablo Maqueda.

Interpreters: Manolo Solo, Laia Manzanares, Eva Llorach.

Genre: thriller. Spain, 2023.

Duration: 88 minutes.

Premiere: June 9.

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Source: elparis

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