Snuff films (the premeditated filming of actual murders) have long provided creatively fertile ground for filmmakers. Alejandro Amenabar's first film, Thesis, takes its place in the snuff pantheon miles above Joel Schumacher's reprehensible 8 mm, still somewhat below David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and comfortably below Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Like Amenabar's two follow-up films, Abre Los Ojos and The Others, Thesis is marvelously constructed and shows the imprint of a student of cinema. Like his other two films, though, Thesis also sometimes feels complicated for the sake of being complicated. But stylish and intellectual and frequently genuinely tense, Thesis is especially impressive when you consider that Amenabar was only 24 when he made it.

Writers know that in a character-driven story, little is more important than how you introduce your main characters. With Thesis, we begin inside a stopped subway car in the Madrid underground. The voice on the intercom is saying that the train is stopped because a man threw himself in front of it and was killed. Passengers gossip that the man was cut in half as the voice urges them to exit the train and not look at the body on the tracks. They're specifically told to look straight ahead and not be morbid. But Angela Marquez (Ana Torrent) can't help herself. She breaks from the line of passengers and tries to catch just a glimpse of the dead body. She's stopped before she can get there and pushed back into line, but it's a perfect introduction to a character who, as the film moves along, will consistently show that whenever there's violence to be seen, she can't look away.

Angela, we discover, is a graduate student in the Film and Television program at the local school of communications. She's working on a thesis on "Audiovisual Violence," images too violence for TV and the movies. First she gets help from her classmate Chema (Fele Martinez), a quintessential film geek rumored to have a large collection of pornography and violent cinema. Chema takes her to the back room of his apartment, a den of depravity where he keeps his dirty movies in a locked closet. Chema shows her a Faces of Death-esque video and expresses a conviction that violent cinema is the only true cinema, because violence is honest.

Meanwhile, Angela's thesis advisor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo) is going into the school's huge film archive to get some violent videos for Angela. Beyond the long hallways of stacks, Figueroa finds a secret hallway and a secret stash of tapes. He chooses one tape to bring to Angela and decides to watch it in a private screening room. The next morning, Angela finds her advisor dead. The film had, apparently, been too tense for his asthma. But with the logical choice between calling the police and giving them the tape, or reporting the body to nobody and taking the tape for herself, Angela doesn't hesitate. Chema watches while Angela covers her eyes, but the tape is genuine snuff, the murder of a co-ed who had vanished years earlier. And because they're all film school geeks, Chema is able to determine that the film was shot on digital video with a digital zoom, something only available on one make of camera  the Sony XT500.

When Angela sees one of these cameras in the hands of pretty-boy Bosco (Eduardo Noriega) she becomes suspicious. While Bosco admits to having known the dead girl, he seems not to know anything about her disappearance and soon Angela is, much to Chema's disgust, becoming infatuated with the charismatic suspect. But Chema may also know more than he's saying. And what's up with Angela's creepy new thesis advisor Jorge Castro (Xabier Elorriaga)?

Thesis is the best kind of example of what happens when a cinema whiz kid decides to indulge in "make what you know" filmmaking. Like Brian DePalma's Blow Out, Thesis revels in both the cinematic minutiae and the self-referential role of cinema in the filmmaker's day-to-day life. And both films believe firmly that even fictional narrative films can be a gateway to truth about the human condition. And, like Peeping Tom before them, the films believe that fear can be that gateway.

The process is centralized in Thesis's use of the Sony XT500 as a crucial plot point. You don't need to know digital filmmaking to see a black square from across a room and immediately recognize it as a Sony battery, but it's fun if you can. And it's not really necessary to know the various textures and grains of digital video, but it's fun if you know what the characters are going to say before they get there.

Similarly, you don't need to know even basic film theory to enjoy the film, but if you've done your share of critical reading on scopophilia (the pleasure of viewing, which veers into voyeurism and why people can't turn their eyes away from pornography and how the male gaze turns even innocent cinema into something resembling pornography) and cinematic violence, you can take the film's message to the next level. The film's somewhat reductive ideology (expressed by Dr. Castro in a lecture) is that Hollywood films thrive around the world by giving audiences what they want and that filmmakers sometimes must sacrifice art to make films for the lowest brow audiences possible if they want their films to be seen. This argument is extended to explain that what people want is violence and sexuality and that as simulated representations become more and more diluted, viewers have to seek harder and harder representations until finally they have to seek truth. True sexuality would be found in hardcore pornography, while true violence would be found in these snuff films. They cut through the artifice to provide thrills and pleasure that are innate to human appreciation. Viewers can never, apparently, see too much sexuality or too much violence because it's part of who we are, but that need just produces more and more demand for baser and baser images. The essence of the snuff film is that there's no make-up, no actors, no script, and no editing. Unalloyed truth.

As I said, it's a little bit simplistic. The film stops short of delving into the more complicated historical theory on the movie camera as a direct conduit to truth. From Vertov to Bazin to Bordwell to Lindsay, film scholars have long debated whether the responsibility of film is to show things the way they are, or to construct a unique and separate art. Thesis answer this question by saying that people want reality. And anybody who has turned on the television in the past four years know that to be the case. The grosser or more deadly things are, the realer audiences believe them to be. Go figure.

But anyway, Thesis isn't, after all, actually a thesis. It's a thriller and thrillers aren't bound by the same level of thought, research, and originality that one might expect in a scholarly essay. Thrillers have rules and formulas and sets of expectations that Amenabar meets admirably, though sometimes on a level that seem calculated even by genre standards. Film, for example, has rarely seen a college with quite so many twisting and turning tunnels and hidden passageways and Amenabar and cinematographer Hans Burman have great fun shooting the camera through these tight corridors. At times, the visual style of Thesis feels more like a submarine movie than a thriller, with Amenabar emphasizing claustrophobia over pacing.

The director alternates between showing surprising tact with the film's violence and then relying on graphic scenes to back them up. Look at the unveiling of the actual snuff tape. At first Angela can't watch, but she records the sounds of a woman screaming. Then Chema watches the tape, but Amenabar avoids showing it to us. At first we see that whatever's on the tape is shocking even to violence-weary Chema and then we find out what's happening through Chema's detached narration. Finally, though, Amenabar just shows us the tape, which strikes me as a mistake because it destroys the illusion of reality. As long as we're told that what's on the tape is real, it's shocking, but when we actual see it, it's just another act of staged violence, no different from anything else in the film. I'd have been more disturbed if I hadn't seen anything.

Amenabar understands that viewers don't want to be able to guess the identity of the killer or killers straight off. In the last thirty minutes, though, the two main male characters get their identities so jumbled up that you lose any concept of motivation as far as the crimes are concerned. Amenabar doesn't actually succeed in making the killer's identity stay ambiguous, but he produces an awful lot of doubt.

The actors are all excellent at playing up the uncertainty. Eduardo Noriega, who was the deformed star of Abre Los Ojos alternates from creepiness to decency like a slightly more mainstream Benicio Del Toro. I don't know what Noriega's English is like, but he has potential to be a cross-over star if that's where his aspirations lie. As the nerdy and also creepy Chema, Fele Martinez doesn't have the same cross-over potential as Noriega, but he provides the film with a mordant black humor that it needs. Certainly there's nothing funny about the situation, but Martinez has an offbeat sense of humor that prevents Thesis from falling into the spiral of nihilism that crippled 8 mm.

In a role that's almost entirely reactive, Ana Torrent take on the role of the viewer. She watches because she can't look away, but that doesn't mean that she can't be disgusted and afraid by the violence all around her. Her character is perhaps a little too innocent to be a worth proxy for the viewers. Although she's writing her thesis on audiovisual violence, she seems a little too surprised by the depths of depravity she witnesses. Could this character have really viewed the world with so little cynicism previously? Can anyone in the audience view this movie with quite so little guile?

Unlike his two subsequent films, which reach surprise conclusions, Thesis plays out to an ending which isn't shocking, but which fits the film's dark tone perfectly. It's an ending that criticizes the media, the audience, and purveyors of cinematic violence in equal measure. Thesis shows the first step of the promise that has made Alejandro Amenabar one of the freshest genre talents on the world cinema stage. I guess my only hope is that as he matures and becomes more confident as a filmmaker, Amenabar will eventually wean himself from an occasional over-reliance on the structural rules of his medium. He's a filmmaker of surprising intellect and skill.

[Apologies if this feels a bit disjointed. I've never had a review in "draft" for quite so long and I felt it was time to just get this one out there...]

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD