Cariño

****

Reviewed by: Andrew Robertson

Carino
"Visceral stuff this, back-woods and isolated, gory and horrifying."

The credits unfold over what one could call a driver's landscape. A sun-bleached Triumph motorcycle, a gentleman of a certain age - hills and scrub, winding concrete curves, the sun and the mountain air. It could be an advertisment, or a motoring programme desperately trying to pretend that it is not one, and then there is a bleeding man in a tattered sun-dress.

Call it shortsploitation, because I will, reckless and quick - visceral stuff this, back-woods and isolated, gory and horrifying. Sharp intakes of breath, nervous laughter. In Q&A, director Shaun Hughes talked about wanting the film to feel like it was set in the Seventies, without explicitly saying so - it's got many of the right trappings, the colour palette is of that spaghetti/paella western mode, the opening credit sequence, the vehicles. We could digress into the relative state of them - no motorcar or motorcycle of an era has the kind of concours corona that isolates survivors, but that's pedantry. When a nail is driven through a foot it appears that a nail is driven through a foot - when blood pumps to the beat of a ragged pulse and drips, drips, drips from a beaten brow it's with a genuine warmth.

Copy picture

Shaun Hughes direction is assured, comfortable on winding curves and in lovestruck shanties. Tim Courtney's music, from lilting Spanish guitar over a man's love affair with a road, then, eventually, ragged keyboard-thumping discord. There's one of those oscilloscope-punishing tones at the start, de rigeur for short shockers, but we'll give it a pass because this amounts to cyclical genre homage. There's a brilliant moment of headless composition, a party stumbling across the frame, a brief moment of contemplation if not respite in the middle of a breathless plunge.

Julian Lee is 'the Rider', but his increasingly haggard countenance doesn't match that of Bhasker Patel's "old man". The rest of the cast are good too, but to give away their identity or number is to spoil the nature of the film's surprise. It's not a pretty story - indeed it's a more than bleak one, built from an idea put together by Lee and Hughes but given detail and colour in its downhill plunge by no small measure of other suns flickering across other sun-dresses.

Cariño means 'darling', and this was certainly an audience favourite at Glasgow's 2013 Short Film Festival. It might also become a favourite of yours - and if it doesn't, well, the beauty of short film is that there's always another one along later.

Reviewed on: 09 Feb 2013
Share this with others on...
A tale of love and torture in an isolated location.

Director: Shaun Hughes

Writer: Shaun Hughes, Julian Lee

Starring: Julian Lee, Bhasker Patel, Xavi Coll, Laura Martuscelli

Year: 2013

Runtime: 10 minutes

Country: UK

Festivals:

Glasgow 2013

Search database:


If you like this, try:

Decapoda Shock
Strayed
Wake In Fright

DJDT

Versions

Time

Settings from settings.local

Headers

Request

SQL queries from 1 connection

Templates (9 rendered)

Cache calls from 2 backends

Signals