Thesis (1996)

Alejandro Amenábar's debut arrives from 1996 Madrid with a film student, a stolen videotape, and a dead professor, and it conducts itself with the tidy cruelty of a genre picture that knows exactly what it is doing. Ángela is writing a thesis on audiovisual violence, stumbles into a snuff film, and spends the rest of the running time being watched. The camera is the villain here. Everyone in the film is complicit in looking, the audience included, and Amenábar makes sure we feel the seat beneath us.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. The cast is uniformly Spanish because the film is set in Spain, and no representational arithmetic was performed in the casting office. Race, sexuality, climate, body politics, and economic grievance are absent, not suppressed but simply outside the film's interests. Ángela survives, outwits, and eventually shoots her attacker, which satisfies a longstanding horror convention about resourceful women; the film's leering use of its female victim complicates any claim that this amounts to a statement of principle. The metafilmic commentary on our appetite for violent images is genuine, but it arrives as plot mechanics, not as a sermon. Nobody stops the thriller to explain the thriller.

What remains is a lean, effective machine from a director who would go on to grander and more self-important work. It has a thesis, as the critics never tire of saying, and the thesis is about us. That is a moral observation of the old school, delivered without a checklist. The film is unsettling, and it earns the unease honestly. There is nothing here that would trouble a modern sensitivity reader, largely because the modern sensitivity reader had not yet been invented.