Abel lives with his mother in an apartment in the Barcelona suburbs. His father is dead and he helps run the family boutique. Business is slow and he wants to sell up, though his assistant Trini is angling for a better redundancy package. When not working Abel helps his friend Marcos start up a new business venture, looks for an apartment with his girlfriend Tere and sundry other everyday activities. He is also a compulsive murderer whom we see kill two complete strangers over the course of a few weeks.
Spanish writer-director Jaime Rosales's feature, The Hours of the Day , demonstrates that there is still mileage in the serial killer film by playing things low key and realistic, avoiding all elements of sensationalism and opting for an open-ended (non-)conculsion.
The most obvious points of comparison, then, are not a Hannibal and Kiss the Girls but rather the Krysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing – Abel's murder of a taxi driver cannot but come across as an overt hommage to the Polish director – and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .
But where Kieslowski's film concerned itself with both crime and punishment, thereby presenting a critique of Lex Talonis justice, Rosales presents no overt social comment. Like McNaughton's Henry, Abel simply is, an unknowable, alien yet all too familiar presence whose actions cannot truly be understood, any attempts to do so – be it capitalism, the post-modern condition or simply the absence of his father – being mere speculation and rationalisation on the viewer's part.
Though not particularly explicit, the film is more shocking and disturbing than the majority of horror entries out there because of it's sheer everydayness.
Rosales never explicitly states that Abel is psychotically disconnected, but it's obvious even before he has kills his first victim, thanks to his remarkably assured mise-en-scene – as cold, distanced and clinical as anything Michael Haneke has ever done – and Alex Brendemühl's utterly convincing performance, quiet on the surface but hinting at a building rage below, that something is bound to explode eventually.
Then, after this slow-burn build-up has increased the tension, its release, with the first murder being presented in a horribly protracted single-take sequence that see's Alex first strangle and repeatedly punch his victim, then finish the job with a second bout of strangling and several blows to the head with a rock, presents a shocking picture of the realities of murder.
Vital, if unpleasant, viewing.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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