Electrophilia

Every year, 30 to 60 people in the UK alone are struck by lightning, with 5% to 10% of them dying as a result. The survivors often experience lifelong neurological problems, chronic pain and irritability, which can isolate them from their loved ones. Because the experience is so rare, there’s little public understanding of this, and even doctors may not fully appreciate its effects. It’s only fairly recently that survivors have been starting to find one another and think about what has happened to them in new ways.

Lucía Puenzo’s Electrophilia (original title Los Impactados), which screened as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, follows Ada (Mariana Di Girólamo), an Argentinian vet who is struck by lightning as she helps a baby calf to take its first breath during a storm. She spends five weeks in a coma, waking to find herself with unusual scars: the path that the lightning took through her body has been traced out in red lines on her pale skin. Later she will find a corresponding pattern on the ground where she was hit, the grass all scorched away.

With her father a doctor, Ada has the best medical care, but she’s still left with a host of troubling symptoms. It doesn’t help that when she goes home, despite being happy to be back with her man, Jano (Guillermo Pfening) and her dog, Virus, she is ordered to rest and, consequently, left with nothing to do. That energised feeling that one sometimes experiences coursing across one’s skin before a storm seems to haunt her. Unable to sleep, she gets up and turns off every electrical device in the apartment, but the feeling remains – Puenzo’s camera picks out sources of electricity in the area, such as overhead power cables, and at one point she hallucinates electrical fields moving across the city. The only relief comes when, eventually, she makes contact with a survivors’ group and finds herself in a room where all such fields have been shut out.

This is the beginning of a strange journey, as Ada adjusts to her strange new reality and learns to live again. With her father and Jano trying to pull her back towards what they see as normality, sedating away her symptoms, she struggles to assert her own desires, to make room for her own identity. Complicating this are unresolved feelings about the death of her mother, who was also unable to reconcile with the country’s traditionally patriarchal society, and this aspect of the story is explored through flashback, one of several devices which brings water-related themes into the mix.

Some people don’t respond to chemical treatment, but do respond to electrical treatment, say Juan (Germán Palacios), a doctor who is a two-time survivor himself. Low level electrical stimulus, carefully directed, removes some of Ada’s symptoms, and also has other effects. She discovers that she’s not the only survivor to experience cravings for the sensation of electricity coursing through her body. As the group explores these desires, Juan cataloguing them for his research, some of its members begin to go to extreme lengths to satisfy them. Ada finds herself succumbing to a dangerous obsession – yet at the same time, her growing hunger for meaningful sensation offers a possible way out of the stifling conventions of middle class life into which she finds herself pressured to reassimilate.

Is it possible to live a normal life after engaging so completely with the sublime? Is it possible to live? Despite its dramatic genesis, this is a delicate journey in search of a new kind of balance. Juan describes being struck by lightning as a resetting of the body’s own electrical signals, a rare opportunity to start again. Puenzo’s film is intense in its passions but subtle in its observations. What might we become if given the chance to redefine ourselves in adulthood instead of forming by accident out of the happenstance of childhood? Can the depression that emerges from Ada’s initial injury give way to something as present and real and alive as that bolt out of the sky?

The currents in Puenzo’s film run deep. It’s beautifully shot and accompanied by a beguiling score, but there’s always an edge to it, an awareness of possibility. The thrills she delivers are not merely about the risk of death, but the awakening of life.