Cannibal is a film from Spanish director Manuel Martin Cuenca released on 2013. It should be noted – and this is important when it comes to the film’s approach to genre subject – that Cuenca’s background as a director was first in documentary and then in non-genre dramas such as The Weakness of the Bolshevik (2003), Hard Times (2005), Half of Oscar (2010) and the subsequent The Author/The Motive (2017), all of which found their audiences in international festival play. Manuel Martin Cuenca astonishes you with the cool, detached understatement he demonstrates in the opening scenes. The credits play out on a very wide-angle that takes place at night with the lit-up forecourt of a gas station in the centre of the shot as we watch a couple as they mill around and get back into their car and depart, before a car window winds up in the foreground and we realise that someone has been secretly observing the whole scene, whereupon the still unseen observer starts his car and follows the couple.

We then switch to the inside of the car of the couple as the stalking driver passes them and then a moment later abruptly turns and reverses at speed back towards them. Cuenca then cuts to another wide angle as the couple’s car is crashed off the side of the road and the mystery driver’s vehicle just sits parked there idling, before we move into closer shots as Antonio de la Torre exits, goes down to the crashed car and returns dragging the woman’s body. We then cut to extreme wide-angles following his vehicle up through the mountains as dawn starts to rise, before he arrives at his mountaintop cabin. Inside, we see him calmly stripping the body and tying the unconscious woman’s wrists to a table. We then see him taking butcher’s implements from the wall and move in to a closeup on her legs as we hear the sound of cutting and see a trail of blood run down the drain of the table into a pan.

The film then cuts to Antonio de la Torre returning to his apartment in the city and nonchalantly placing several wrapped slabs of meat into his freezer. These scenes presage exciting things for the film to follow. The cold obliqueness of the set-up, which tells us everything we need to know about the character, his stalking and the methodical coolness of his butchery, all without a single line of dialogue in twelve minutes, is astonishing. Not to mention is almost the complete opposite of everything we expect from a genre film or a work entitled Cannibal. Any easy expectations of a horror film – that Manuel Martin Cuenca is going to do something to shock us or pull standard suspense set ups – quickly go out the window. It becomes a film of silences where everything takes place in slowness and quietude. On the other hand, such an astonishing opening leaves you constantly expecting that something even more out there is going to happen. 

After Antonio de la Torre returns home, the film segues into a series of much quieter scenes that pit his unobtrusive, impassive personality up against the breezy energy of Olimpia Melinte (which is all offset by the secrets we know he is holding). There is such a strong contrast between the two opposites that it becomes an abrupt disconnect when she suddenly disappears off stage. Alas, the film that up until then has been slow-building simply becomes one that is slow and uneventful. The plot becomes more than an hour’s worth of drawn-out drama centred around the issue of what happened to Alexandra – and the question that looms unspoken of whether he ate her or not? – and then of the budding attraction that seems to grow between he and her sister Nina where we seem to go through about the same length of time wondering if he is going to kill and eat her too.

Cuenca does punctuate the set-up with one scene – a less effective variant on the opening scene – where de la Torre follows a couple to the beach (where, as we first see him spy on them, we are unnerved by the woman’s resemblance to Alexandra), where the couple go skinny-dipping, de la Torre sneaks into and takes their car, the man runs up the dunes only to promptly be rammed by the car and de la Torre then comes down to the beach to wait for the woman to come out of the water, waiting as the light passes from day until night, before she chooses to swim out into the ocean to what we later learn is her death.

cannibal edit,cannibal home,cannibal movies 2021 full movie english,cannibal movies 2013 horror,cannibal movie actor,cannibal mutants movie explained in English,cannibal movie insight English,Cannibal 2013 Movie Review in English,cannibal movie explained in telugu,cannibal movie in west virginia,cannibal movie imdb,cannibal movie Wiki,cannibal movie English Review,cannibal movie 2013,cannibal movie plot,cannibal movie Explaining English,cannibal movie Summery