VD
Vincenzo de Divitiis
•A man returns home, parks his car, and enters the kitchen to prepare dinner for a woman named Eve, whom he keeps prisoner in a dark and unsanitary basement. When he hands her the plate, things do not go as planned, and the young woman hits him with a brick, stunning him and managing to free herself. Armed with a pistol taken from her abductor, the woman decides not to abandon the isolated house and flee as far away as possible, but to kidnap the man and force him to free one by one the girls immortalized in some photos present in the apartment and who seem to have suffered the same fate. The two thus begin a long journey in stages that, in addition to allowing the different victims of this horrible game to be found, will reveal a chilling truth concerning Eve's past and a person very dear to her.
"From South America with fury" or would it be better to say "with horror": with this slogan —borrowed from the title of the famous film with Bruce Lee— one could describe the new wave coming from Latin America that has invaded the horror scene of recent years enriching it with quality products and a discreet innovative charge, it is enough to think of names like the Colombian Andrés Baiz ("The Hidden Truth"), the Argentine Andrés Muschietti ("Mama") and the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez ("The House").
A new generation of directors who, despite their geographical location, have had the great merit of not fossilizing on the model of American horror cinema to let themselves be contaminated by trends and styles coming from Europe and the Orient; significant examples are Alvarez and Muschietti whose reference archetypes are respectively the disproportionate and excessive violence of certain French horror cinema of the two thousand and the Japanese-style ghost stories with makeup of the ghosts similar to that seen in "The Ring" and derivatives. Characteristics that cannot be attributed to José Manuel Craviotto who with "Reversal – Escape is just the beginning", his second work after the crime action "El Más Buscado", signs a work strongly related to contemporary made in USA products and little inclined to bring any novelty to the genre. The result is a psychological thriller, or at least that is the intention, which does not disdain some sporadic and contained incursions into splatter and some action movie dynamics, of modest value due to a stuttering screenplay that does not allow the film to assume a well-defined logical thread.
From the reading of the plot and the title, the viewer perfectly knows that he is facing a classic B-movie in which the kidnapping no longer serves as a starting point, but as a triggering mechanism for a story entirely focused on the protagonist's desire for revenge against her abductor.
Nothing new under the sun, but for long stretches the setup put in place by Cravioto holds up and fully does its duty thanks also to a frantic pace, the right dose of action and blood in the right places and a management of tension that accompanies the viewer as the story enters its climax moments. Everything proceeds perfectly until the moment when the second plot of the film comes into play, the one parallel to the first and focused on the protagonist's past, which reveals evident screenplay holes and is told only through found footage images that should describe Eve's life before the tragic mishap and evoke a final twist that turns out to be telegraphed and useless for how it is inserted into the plot. A huge flaw that, in addition to highlighting a desire to overdo it on the part of Cravioto, does not allow to give depth to the characters and consequently create empathy between the latter and the viewer.
The same desire to overdo it is noticeable also in the stylistic approach of the Mexican author. At first glance, in fact, the film benefits from a clean direction supported by the use of skewed shots, aimed at emphasizing the agitation of the tense moments, and a photography that alternates dark tones with more vivid colors present in the indoor environments and effective in giving body to a climate of constant tension.
Even here, however, the spasmodic search for virtuosity at all costs plays a bad trick and this materializes with a recurring, useless and annoying use of slow-motion images and temporal jumps in the narration that do nothing but confuse the viewer without leaving him the possibility to understand the effective development of a rather confusing plot.
The cast sees as absolute protagonists of the scene Tina Ivlev and Richard Tyson, both very good but penalized by the characterization of two flat characters and lacking in psychological depth. In short, the basic idea is good but in the end Cravioto's work turns out to be pretentious and improvable in many respects.
