A blood-curdling thriller by the young Chilean-Spanish débutant Alejandro Anemábar. Protagonist is film student Angela (a convincing role by Ana Torent) who is writing a theses on violence in the media. After her mentor has promised her several extremely violent videos, Angela finds him dead with a video tape in his hand. With the porn and horror addict Chema she watches the video. It looks like an authentic ‘snuff movie’ (the registration of a murder committed especially for the film, usually with sexual overtones). They recognise the girl involved as a fellow student who disappeared several years previously.Angela and Chema decide to investigate the case and stick their noses in a wasps’ nest of violence and perversion. The theme of Angela’s thesis becomes very concrete when her life is endangered: she has been chosen to play the lead in a future ‘snuff movie’. That film may be a fake, but she can’t count on it.Amenábar’s film is clearly the work of a lover of the more extreme gore and splatter genre. Tesis has a pleasant B-film quality. The young maker follows in the controversial footsteps of films like Peeping Tom by Michael Powell and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The more perverted side of Alfred Hitchcock has also left its mark. Amenábar can be forgiven for not yet having attained the level of these greats. (GjZ)
