Distancia de rescate by Samanta Schweblin

Back then, she and her husband, Omar (Germán Palacios), planned to breed show horses, before a stallion’s mysterious death plunged them into debt. The two women hit it off, though the film has barely established their friendship when the timeline splinters into Carola’s past, when she lived in the house Amanda is now occupying. Soon after, their friendly, vibrant neighbor Carola (Dolores Fonzi) arrives bearing pails of drinking water, with a warning not to trust what comes out of the tap: unsurprising on a farmstead, perhaps, though the first hint that there’s something unsound about the area. A woman is dragged by unseen forces across a damp, dark forest floor as a young boy’s disembodied voice counsels her to stay awake: “What you see, we all see.” It’ll take us some time to figure out how this discombobulating framing figures into proceedings as we cut to real-world daylight – as the same woman, Amanda (Spanish star Maria Valverde), arrives at an idyllic rural cottage for an extended getaway, her young daughter Nina (Guillermina Sorribes) in tow. I do recommend the novel which is only one example of Schweblin’s fine writing – which includes three collections of short stories, the brilliant Mouthful of Birds (Pájaros en la boca) and Seven Empty Houses (Siete caca vacías).Īdvertisement Amanda (María Valverde) fleeing the house with Nina (Guillermina Sorribes)Īn ominous opening sequence threatens a full-on horror film, beginning with extreme close-ups of human body parts and undulating slugs. This haunting story of broken souls, toxins, looming environmental and spiritual catastrophes, and the ties that bind a parent to a child is based on a source novel Distancia de rescate by Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, who co-adapted the novel with Claudia Llosa. The film’s narrative unfolds less as fever dream than waking nightmare, though its hazy, sunstruck styling lends it a certain somnambulant quality. Fever Dream is a psychological thriller in which two mothers fear their children’s souls have gone adrift. I think I prefer a direct translation of its Spanish title Distancia de rescate (“The Rescue Distance”), which refers to the protagonist’s constant mental calculations as to how long it would take to reach her daughter in an emergency. A new film on the scene in Los Angeles and soon to air on Netflix as of October 13 is Claudia Llosa’s Fever Dream (Peru, 2021).

Distancia de rescate by Samanta Schweblin