WAKE UP AND DIE

Camilla wakes up after a wild night. She is not in her bed and next to her is a man she doesn't know. She seems to remember nothing of what happened the night before. Embarrassed, she explains to the man, Dario, that she is not used to doing these things and that she would like to leave. He, on the other hand, does everything he can to keep her in the apartment, even becoming violent. She dies and wakes up again in Dario's bed. The cinema of recent years has often shown us films built on nothing, experimenting thus a new way of making cinema. It is not always necessary to have dozens of locations, extras, special effects when you have an idea. If this idea is also economically favorable and with a few coins the producers can put it together, so much the better. In the case of this "Volver a morir", film by the Colombian Miguel Urrutia translated for the international market as "Wake Up and Die", they have gone even further, reducing to a minimum locations, characters and even costumes. The film has only two protagonists, Camilla (played by the sensual Andrea Montenegro) and Dario (Luis Fernando Bohórquez) who wake up embracing in a room of a cold and bare house. She seems disoriented, perhaps she does not remember well what happened the night before and does not even remember ending up in bed with that man, who, on the other hand, seems to remember everything. A night of fun with a stranger in a few words. While Camilla, embarrassed, tries to justify her behavior of the night before, Dario turns on the radio. In the room, Bach's "Air on the Fourth String" plays and, overcome by a burst of violence, he kills her. So far, everything is normal, but after Camilla's death, the film rewinds as if the viewer had pressed the "Rew" button of their player and everything starts again, with Camilla waking up in the bed of a stranger, not so much a stranger anymore. And it is at this moment that the viewer sighs in relief, thinking that perhaps they are about to see an interesting film. The story begins again, then begins again and then again. Each time, a small piece of the past of the two protagonists is added and each time the reason why they ended up in the same room seems clearer. A kind of "Groundhog Day" mystery and paradoxical version that bets everything on minimalism: only two actors on stage, one location consisting of an apartment with a mattress, a stereo and a beautiful collection of cutting weapons, the same musical piece that repeats throughout the film as a nearly constant presence and, last detail but not least important, the actors perform nude for the entire eighty minutes of the film, with the exception of two scenes where they put something on. A decent starting idea but with a weak story that unfortunately develops into boredom. For eighty minutes we see the same scenes that repeat, with some variations, but after the initial surprise of the rewind, by the third time we start to yawn. The pieces that make up the story are very simple and the overall picture of the plot does not surprise, with a possessive mother worthy of Hitchcock. It all smells of seen before even if you can't help but break a lance in favor of Urrutia who, after all, has managed to find a different way to tell the same story. Nice idea to have the protagonists act nude all the time.