‘Jaula’, the first feature film by Ignacio Tatay, opens on September 9 with a cast led by Elena Anaya and is produced by Pokeepsie Films, the production company of Álex de la Iglesia and Caroline Banga mysterious proposal that borders on terror and has its greatest asset in the intrigue that its starting point poses, one of those movies that the less you know about it, the better.
Paula (Elena Anaya) and her husband (Paul Miller) return by car from a dinner and suddenly, they run into a girl (Eva Tenner) wandering alone on the road. Two weeks later, after finding out that no one wants her, they decide to accept her at home temporarily to help her and turn their life as a couple around, but it won’t be easy, since the girl lives obsessed with the idea that if she leaves a square of chalk painted on the ground something terrible is going to happen to him.
Paula will begin a journey through dark paths to try to discover the enigma of the girl’s past, with whom she has managed to establish an emotional bond. That is the principle of ‘Cage’, which adds various meanders and cryptic elements in the development of its plot, in such a way that the viewer who has not seen the trailer or heard about it you may think it belongs to very different genres and that at some point it will come out for an unexpected solution.
Good Spanish genre cinema
Tatay knows very well how to unfold a carpet of possibilities and enigmas that lead one to think that there is something much more complex behind what it seems, and to a certain extent it works that way, although not as one might imagine. It is very difficult to talk about what we can find in its 106 minutes without gutting itbut if there is something that each and every one of them do well, it is to maintain that sensation of possibilities, of opening up to endless paths that they could go through.
Obviously, in this type of case, the route it ends up taking is not the most unthinkable or satisfactory, but the truth is that the script achieves what it wants, and it would be a mistake to underestimate its ability to maintain suspense and ambiguity. We can think that the film is about a malevolent girl, about a sinister invisible sect, an alien abduction, the paranoia of a frustrated woman who thinks she sees things… all possibilities are open at some point.
‘Cage’ is playful, but at the same time rough and oppressive, reminds the horror thrillers of Balagueró and Plaza at the beginning of their careers, but it is a more aesthetic and tone sensation, since the back and forth of situations invites more to the idea of the literary pulp, in which what counts is the experience, the path, the comings and goings. In the cast, everyone believes what they are saying, from Pablo Molinero, Carlos Santos, Eva Llorach, Esther Acebo or Eloy Azorín to Eva Tennear.
A pulp novel with a very dark background
Tatay uses a cold tone, almost of dark drama, timeless and dense to suggest and disconcert the viewer as he accumulates clues that the protagonist deciphers in a descent into the rabbit hole with enough riddles to fill a season of a Netflix series. Elena Anaya shows her pulse as an ideal actress for psychological horror in a projected maternity portrait that moves on the tone of films like ‘Pelican Blood’ (2019).
Moving on to areas of psychic conditioning where the “cages” are different for each character, this is a good psychological thriller full of mysteries and twists, which maintains its intrigue as if it were an airport novelthe ones you don’t want anyone to tell you about but forget about in a week, condensed into less than two hours, although it takes very shady detours until it reaches a straight horror climax.
Tatay cannot be blamed for making ‘Cage’ an equivalent to a page turner, but neither can it be ignored that the resolution falls within the less suggestive options, and yet, it leaves a sensation of a complete trip that reminds one sometimes impact films are needed that do not try to change the course of the genre, just keep sitting for a long time with your hand on your chin, and your eyes fixed on the screen. It is not so easy to find them in the platform premieres every Friday.