The Country House And Its Karma
3.png)
CAT INDEX
CAT INDEX OVERVIEW
SCREENPLAY
MAKING
ACTING
The Country House and its Karma | Reviewed by Gaurav Dutta
The Country House and its Karma, a short film directed by Juan Pablo Bornio. A short film of 10 minutes starting with a dark ambience where a house is portrayed with big gates and the on screen captions tell us, it is based on the time of militarism in the late 1800s, such a time where slaves were tortured. In this movie it is said that, there were jaguars kept in this house which were fed with slave fleshes.
The movie starts by a pair of detectives going to this house where a crime of a dead girl has been reported. Ivanna, one of the detectives fills the film audience in by describing the past stories of this house and the tortures that went through here. Here, they are greeted by a watchman who confirms that he had called for the crime and takes the two detectives to the crime scene to investigate. The movie picks up and is great with the follow up camera movements, as you would feel a presence of someone around you all the time. It takes a turn into the past events where two slaves are shown to be running away from a person with a gun, and the same appears to be happening in the present with the two detectives. The person who is chasing them has an attire of an old traditional dress of militants and pushes them in to a garden where the jaguars used to live. In this whole duration we notice that there is a light emitting from the chasing man’s body the whole time, seeming to the viewers that everything is a hallucination and not a real human. Our main film characters appear to reach a cave running away from the jaguars, and we are taken back to the present and past multiple times just to give us an idea of the rush while a fast paced music runs in the background.
The movie ends with the girl coming out of the cave from behind who was supposed to have died at the crime scene and the man with a gun stands in front our two main detectives, cornering them from both sides.
A cliffhanger end to the film, providing the viewers to think on the whole scene that was portrayed and add their logic to it. It may be judged as a ghost film or just a hallucination of some past trauma our detective, Ivanna may have suffered. The camera work done is sensational, as it captures some beautiful visuals of an owl, and the presence of the jaguars, the running camera shakes are a little blurry but seems to catch the rush and the thrill of the situation.
A short and gripping story worthy of various conclusions.
