Julián (Nacho Sánchez) has an overflowing imagination. At least, that’s what fans who enjoy the monsters he creates for video games in the movie admire. manticore. His are not only terrifying, they are also curiously substantial.
An aggressive, violent and most of the time unpleasant entity that has made him a celebrity in the virtual world. For the designer, a monster is a perverse conception of beauty. As expressive, artistic and consistent as any other work that expresses man as a creator of private worlds.
This unique and seemingly simple premise is what is supported by the story of manticoreby Carlos Vermouth. But what looks like another version about the masks behind which perversity is hidden realistic becomes, thanks to the director, something more. Much nastier than might be supposed. Especially as the plot makes it clear that each of Julian’s creatures is actually a symbol.
manticore
The real monster in Manticore is a tragedy waiting to happen. So close, that it is repulsive by its mere possibility. Vermouth carefully approaches the core of the unpleasant, the fearful, the terrifying. He shows it, narrates it in fragments that may or may not lead to a terrifying conclusion. But, in reality, Manticore is not interested in what happens, nor in what will happen. What really haunts the film is the suggestion of impending cruelty. The whole story carefully works on the atmosphere, strives to build a stifling feeling. Increasingly isolated, enraged, debased, Julián is a monster who begins to lose the limits of reality and what happens in his private world.
Not only from himself (which they are), but also from the tortuous path he travels to avoid falling into the final darkness. Julián carries a secret on his back. One so twisted, deplorable and sinister that he can only express it through fearsome creatures. He to manifest pain and fear through an alternate world in which he can flee from that shadowy place within.
Disgust turned into a creature with its own life
But not everything is so simple in manticore much less when Vermut, an expert in dealing with horrors with a human face, pushes Julián towards the stratum of reality. After saving a boy from a fire, the abyss that hides in his virtual creatures is closer than ever to the tangible. For the character, a supposed heroic act becomes a connection with that root of the conscious, depraved and abject. From fear by the drive to a monstrous need that barely controls.
A space of pure isolation and disgust from which the character struggles to get out, without success. Julián suddenly has to face directly that he is a ferocious predator. Which could be at any step. That he will be if each piece in his life ends up holding something more fearsome and, apparently, inevitable.
manticore and the taboo of pedophilia
The issue of pedophilia and pedophilia is one of the most complex taboos to narrate in any field of film and television. Vermouth achieves it, not by delving into the dirtiest and most uncomfortable places of him, but by doing it in the darkness of what is suggested.
The real monster in manticore It’s a tragedy waiting to happen. So close that it is repulsive by its mere possibility. Vermouth carefully approaches the core of the unpleasant, the fearful, the terrifying. She shows it, narrates it in fragments that may or may not lead to a terrifying conclusion.
But actually, manticore it is not interested in what happens, nor in what will happen. What really haunts the film is the suggestion of impending cruelty. The whole story carefully works on the atmosphere, strives to build a stifling feeling. Increasingly isolated, enraged, debased, Julián is a monster who begins to lose the limits of reality and what happens in his private world.
The jaws of fear getting closer
But that line, increasingly blurred in manticore, must face a monotonous reality. The plot explores how Julián fights against what lurks in his mind, which little by little is getting out of control. The script, also by Vermut, opens spaces and narrative lines around something overwhelming. Of the possibility of a horror that Julián embodies in his solitude, of the search for violent dissatisfaction.
manticore It is the story in slow reconstruction of an aberration that has not yet occurred, but that is being built step by step. The fear becomes clearwhile the disgust becomes an irrespirable and dense tension.
One of the great qualities of the film is its attention to elaborate a journey through the perfidious from the human. vermouth wants that manticore be a reality check about what ordinary faces can hide. The unspeakable sins of the common man. Perhaps the most terrifying parts of him happen when Julián goes from the real world to the virtual one, to expose the darkness at a core in his mind. A region that is about to get out of control, to hold on to a bitter and cruel step that will transform it into an infamous creature.
The monster that devours and the man who devours the monster in manticore
The virtual reality metaphor that separates Julián from the world around him is obvious. The perversion that overwhelms him will never allow him to cross an invisible line towards a normal relationship or having friends. The character looks at the world through the bonnet that leads him to his own world of monsters.
At the same time, his depraved impulse separates him from any possibility of hope, happiness or emotional communion. Completely alone, confined to total intellectual silence, Julián sustains himself in a dark and increasingly deplorable suffering. A slippery terrain that the character must walk without knowing if it will finally lead to the final fall.
In the end, the monster that is Julián is tragic by the mere fact of his inevitable fate. Like the creatures he creates, he is destined to fight to lose. Finally, to fall into a devastating abyss. A point that manticore handled with skill and that gives Vermouth’s film, perhaps, one of the most disturbing endings of the year.
