Movie Review : Wild Tales (2014)

Everybody thinks they've been wronged about something crucial at some point in their lives. It's a strange quirk of human nature that makes the vanishing of your hopes and dreams somehow. Thinking it's been stolen away from us is better than thinking we blew it. It's why we love revenge stories so much. We vicariously live through them. Vengeance movies are problematic to me though, because I'm that jerk who often finds himself rooting for the bad guy. The more righteous is the wronged party, the more I'll root for the asshole because I identify with the guy who will bend the rules to get his way.

Argentinian movie WILD TALES was a movie meant for contrarian pricks like me to enjoy. Enter here ye who abandoned all hope of ever being properly vindicated.

Interestingly enough, WILD TALES is a movie built like a short story collection, with six different storylines that each illustrate an aspect of vengeance that you have never seen on a cinema screen before. My favorite one featured an arrogant urbanite and a psychotic redneck having an escalating road rage episode in the middle of nowhere. What makes it stand out is that there's no discernible wronged party, so it keeps going back and forth between both characters, making the segment completely unpredictable. It also speaks a universal truth on vengeance: if every party feels wronged, getting revenge on your enemy is only going to prompt him to seek revenge back on you.

My second favorite segment of WILD TALES also was the last and arguable most spectacular one. The storyline is about a woman learning on her wedding day that her new husband has been cheating on him with some bimbo he works with. The poor woman loses it, goes on a rampage and turns her own wedding into a celebration from hell. Granted that it was meant to be the grand finale of WILD TALES and it is sometimes gorgeous looking for the sake of being gorgeous looking, but director Damian Szifron kept it interesting by constantly upping the ante and finding new ways that a wedding could go wrong. Not as satisfying as the road segment, but full of unexpected twists and turns nonetheless.

This is just the beginning. 

WILD TALES examines every aspect of vengeance from the cartoonish and satisfying to the darkest and most unsettling.  It's a movie meant to get that very trope out of its audience's system, because I don't know how you can follow up on that. The lesson from WILD TALES is that there is absolutely no point in causing more harm once you've been wronged because violence only leads to death and destruction, and sometimes to rebirth in the most twisted possible way (don't ask, I'm not spoiling that one. It's too good). It's not going to be remembered for what it's trying to be though. WILD TALES is way too slickly written and cleverly shot to avoid becoming a cult movie. People will see whatever they want in it, isolate a single part of the movie if they feel like the rest doesn't comply with their vision of vengeance.

There are several great reasons to watch WILD TALES. I don't watch as many foreign movies as I used to, but this one doesn't suffer from an inferiority complex towards Hollywood. Its fragmented and non-linear nature works admirably well because it puts the theme of the movie forward before the characters and keeps the audience waiting for moments of striking satisfaction. Damian Szifron is a clever director with a great future ahead of him and WILD TALES is just about the most original movie you're going to see this year. Its greatest achievement is to efficiently put themes and feelings ahead of plot and characters. It takes a master storyteller to do that.