José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela) is a frustrated horror film director of short budget stories and heroin addict in a thunderous relationship with Ana Turner (Cecilia Roth) . The cousin of his ex-girlfriend Marta (Marta Fernandez Muro) , outcast Pedro (Will More) , sends him a reel of film , an audio cassette, and the key to his apartment despite the fact that the two have only met twice. As José and Ana listen , the audio cassette narrates the two occasions when the two men met . The strange Pedro, who is an obsessive maker of homemade films , snorts heroin with José and asks if he knows how to film time-lapse photography. Pedro shows José his home movie s, which he has never shown to anyone . Later on , José , mails Pedro an interval timer that would control his camera's shutter, shooting at specified intervals . Shortly after , the rare and offbeat Pedro is suddenly missing . As the druggie filmmaker will investigate what happened with the author while shooting his brief consciousness during drug abuse which subsequently disappeared. The research will lead the characters to fall deeper in drugs addiction.
A plain and simple plot dealing with a short budget horror filmmaker gets in touch with an eccentric young who is attempting to shoot weird movies becomes into a confuse yarn in David Lynch style resulting in a quasi-lysergic experience for the spectators . This is a ¨cult movie¨ deemed to be the fundamental and essential film of the ¨Spanish Movida¨ of the late 70s and early 80s that took place mainly in Madrid , and away from the thematic and technical assumptions of conventional cinema . The picture chooses to play freely with the elements of audiovisual language with a claustrophobic examination of the secret potency of shoot itself with astonishing time-lapse frames . It results to be a challenge for movie exegesis , that's why some reviewers panned extremely the film because of it contains uncompelling characters and "inscrutable" screenplay . Trio starring : Eusebio Poncela , Will More , Cecilia Roth , giving nice acting . They are accompanied by brief appearances and cameos from Elena Fernán Gómez , Luis Ciges , Alaska , Pedro Almodovar , some of the uncredited. Special mention for the film's cinematography by Angel Luis Fernández , mood , strange musical score and director Zulueta's building of tension . It packs an atmospheric and eerie soundtrack by Negativo and Iván Zulueta himself but uncredited , adding fragments from Siegfried's Funeral March written by Richard Wagner and a song : I Want You, I Need You, I Love You written by Ira Kosloff and performed by Cecilia Roth .
The picture was original but rarely directed by Iván Zulueta . Iván was born in 1943 and died 2009 in Donostia-San Sebastián, Guipúzcoa, País Vasco, Spain . He was a director and writer, especially known for this Arrebato (1979) , Un, dos, tres... al escondite inglés (1970) and a lot of shorts as A mal gam (1976) Frank Stein , Masaje , Kinkón, among others . Zulueta with Arrebato won several nominations and prizes as Chicago International Film Festival 1980 Nominee Gold Hugo Best Feature Iván Zulueta ; Fantasporto 1982 Winner Critics' Award Iván Zulueta Winner International Fantasy Film Award Best Screenplay Iván Zulueta Best Actor Eusebio Poncela ; Nominee International Fantasy Film Award Best Film Iván Zulueta and Mystfest 1980 Nominee Best Film Iván Zulueta. Rating : 6.5/10 . The flick will appeal to ¨Cult Movies¨fans. .
