Amat Escalante’s The Untamed, AKA La Región Salvaje (The Wild Region), is an unusual blend of social realism and Lovecraftian tentacle horror that sounds almost absurd when surmised aloud. But it is both original and compelling, and a film you certainly won’t forget in a hurry.
Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) is trapped in an unhappy marriage to Ángel (Jesús Meza), who is angry and bad tempered and, as it turns out, having an affair with her brother Fabián (Eden Villavicencio). Fabián is wracked with guilt for betraying his sister, while Ángel’s self-loathing boils over with increasingly nasty displays of homophobia and aggression.
In the countryside, just outside town, an older couple is keeping an extraterrestrial creature in their barn. Veronica (Simone Bucio) visits the barn to have sex with the creature (I said you won’t forget this film). However, the alien becomes increasingly violent and, in their most recent encounter, Veronica is badly injured.
Veronica is treated in hospital for her injury by Fabián, who works there as a nurse. They share common ground – both of them trapped in bad relationships – and a friendship is immediately formed. Fabián introduces her to Alejandra and the two women also hit it off immediately. Veronica takes Fabián to see the creature, but he is attacked and later, discovered unconscious in a field.
As weird and original as The Untamed is, there is another movie it quickly brings to mind: Andrzej Żuławski’s infamous 1981 “video nasty”, Possession, which was an inspiration for Escalante. Żuławski’s astonishing portrait of a disintegrating marriage and a horny tentacle monster playing third wheel, does share surface level similarities with The Untamed. But where Possession is downright unhinged, The Untamed is thoughtful. Where Żuławski favours a ballistic, full throttle approach, Escalante’s tactics are quieter, his focus always on the character drama at the heart of his story.
Escalante and co-writer Gibrán Portela effectively balance the contrasting tones of social drama and science fiction, so the seriousness of its subject matter is never undermined by its outlandish counterpoint. But neither does the alien feel tacked on or as if it’s compensating for story deficiency. Instead, these seemingly disparate elements complement each other perfectly.
In this regard, The Untamed sits nicely alongside the likes of Valdimar Jóhannsson’s 2021 film Lamb or Issa López’s 2017 film Tigers Are Not Afraid; all three could easily work as straightforward indie dramas, but are made all the more interesting by cryptic, supernatural forces.
The true nature and purpose of the alien in The Untamed remains shrouded in ambiguity, which adds further levels of intrigue. All we know is that it originated from a meteorite, but the closest we get to any explanation is from the older man in the countryside, who theorises the alien is humanity’s true, primal nature. Escalante himself has stated the creature is a reflection of his characters’ feelings, and the inner desires they are drawn to and repulsed by, made manifest. Both Ángel and Alejandra are trapped by their marriage and confined by family life. Ángel is further restricted by his parents’ homophobia and the intolerant local community, meaning he can never live the life he wants. And Fabián is trapped in his relationship with Ángel, which he knows is unhealthy but is unable to resist. Their true desires are all trapped and confined by circumstance, just as the creature is physically confined to the barn.
The alien is an eye-popping combination of practical and CGI, kept largely off screen in true creature feature tradition, shown only as creeping tentacles in the edge of the frame until the big reveal. It’s a wiggly, phallic beast, steeped in the aesthetics of Lovecraftian mythology – a perverted design of sex and death that would make HR Giger blush.
As The Untamed finally leans into its weirdness, there’s a pretty good chance you might think to yourself: “What the hell am I watching?” It’s fair to say it is not exactly conventional. Its appeal hinges entirely on whether you’re on board with introducing a lump of tentacles to an otherwise sombre and gritty character exploration. But it works exceptionally well. If you are hankering for a movie that is truly out of the ordinary, The Untamed will reward your curiosity.
