A Yard Of Jackals

During the Seventies, Chile produced so much dark history that it is still a topic of conversation and serves as an inspiration for works of art, music, literature and cinema. The newest example comes from a filmmaker and editor Diego Figueroa who was born in 1991, a year after dictator Augusto Pinochet was forced to step down, and who could not possibly have first-hand experience of the dreaded junta. A Yard Of Jackals is his directorial debut in feature-length and it has just premiered at the First Features competition of Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia.

When we first meet our protagonist Raul (Néstor Cantillana), he seems as meek as a middle-aged man could possibly be. He takes care of his ailing mother (Grimanesa Jimenez) and rarely leaves the row house in the suburbs of Santiago, but when he does, he either goes to a nondescript office to collect his newest job assignment – he makes the miniatures and scaled models of military buildings at home – or to visit a local textile shop owned and operated by the sisters Laura (Blanca Lewin) and Renata (María Jesús Marcone). He even has an attempt at a relationship with Laura, who is waiting for an immigration visa for France where she is about to join her filmmaker son. She also has an interesting hobby – recording the sounds of nature and human interaction with it.

But Raul cannot sleep because of loud noises coming from the house next door. That place is frequented by unsavoury types: a man who looks like a corrupt politician or a raw government agent and his henchmen, one of whom has an ugly scar on his face, while a vicious dog barks from the backyard. The sounds are those of torture and even Raul, meek as he is, cannot stand them any more, so he makes futile efforts to alarm the police. Raul also has trouble sleeping, so he is losing his mind, but the bigger problem is that he has no one to open up to since he does not know if he can trust anyone, given the paranoia that looms over the country. He only knows that he has to do something and Laura is willing to offer her help, but he would also like to protect her.

We know what is going on here even before the cards are revealed because the topic of junta’s crimes against humanity and clandestine detention, interrogation and torture centres is far from a new, unseen one. But that does not matter because Figueroa’s genre-infused approach that suits the topic very well. A Yard of Jackals operates in the genre register of thriller, psychological rather than political, with some hints of horror achieved by forging a tense, paranoid atmosphere along the lines of Roman Polanski’s loose “Apartment” trilogy, which also has an effect on the viewers to start questioning the protagonist’s sanity.

Restrained acting, with the cast members perfectly aware that they can expose their characters’ standpoints only so much also suits the film well. The same could also be said for Martín Hurtado Marín’s cinematography, which is completely in the vein of “faux Seventies” and the revealing sound design that adds another layer of tangible, realistic horror, despite the general predictability of the proceedings.

Simply put, everything is fine and dandy until a last plot twist that offers some previously undeveloped parallels between the characters, a leap forward in time and an alternative ending that somehow twists the complete story we were told just beforehand. But despite that overstated ambition and the filmmaker’s cockiness to try to give us a final punch, A Yard Of Jackals is more than a decent film, while in its own category of a feature-length debut it can be seen as pretty impressive.