Five-Legged Iguana

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2011
Candidate # 28

AMER
(September 2009)


Playing like a curious love letter to Argento, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s feature-length debut, Amer, is largely about mood and style, a cinematic exercise where narrative takes a back seat to impressionism and dream logic. While dialogue is sparse, shades of classic Argento (giallo and otherwise) can be found scattered throughout Amer’s 90 minute running time, where eroticism and death constantly stare at each other from opposite sides of a cracked mirror.
And while I single out Dario Argento as a clear touchstone of Amer, it should be noted that in an interview, Cattet and Forzani also mention Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and Shinya Tsukamoto, among others, as inspirations. They also make it a point to acknowledge Argento’s Inferno and the late Satoshi Kon’s Sennen Joyû (Millennium Actress). Perhaps not so incidentally, it’s interesting to note that Kon’s Perfect Blue is itself, an animated nod to giallo.
While this is clearly not for everyone, Amer is quite definitely the most singular ¡Qué Horror! 2011 candidate thus far.

(Amer OS courtesy of twitchfilm.net.)