Directed by: Damián Szifron
Staring: Darío Grandinetti, María Marull & Mónica Villa
Wild Tales is a difficult film to write about without giving away tell-tale plot details. It is a raucously entertaining collection of “six deadly stories of revenge”. The brilliance of the film (produced by Pedro Almodóvar) lies in its combination of excess and ordinariness. There is a lot of violence, staged in a manner so extreme and so comical that it verges on the cartoonish. At the same time, the young Argentine writer-director Damián Szifron roots the tales in circumstances that every cinemagoer will recognise. If you’ve ever had a parking ticket or attended a wedding that got out of hand or held a grudge from schooldays, you will recognise the motivations of the protagonists. The stories are quite different from one another but are linked by common themes. As Szifron has written, they are about “catharsis, vengeance and destruction… and the undeniable pleasure of losing control”.