2017 is well on its way to being the year of the auteur genre film. With Grave, Get Out, It Comes At Night and certainly other nuggets too numerous to mention here, it is Mexico's turn to unleash with the strange and singular film of Amat Escalante: The Wilderness. So singular that it risks losing the viewer…
The basic premise already shows the strangeness of this film. It is about a couple in crisis who meet a young woman who leads them to a cabin that contains a strange creature, bringing both desire and desolation…
The film has a very chaotic structure, giving the impression of witnessing a (erotic?) dream, with sequences that do not seem to have any connection with each other, but that eventually connect. The film focuses on the character of Alejandra, a young mother who has to face her husband, strongly homophobic at first, who turns out to have an affair with Alejandra's brother. But all this pretty little world begins to derail, as soon as Alejandra's brother is found in a coma, severely injured. While her lover is accused, Alejandra, guided by another young woman, Veronica, discovers that the culprit is actually none other than an alien creature, loving to have sex with young women, to whom Alejandra will eventually succumb…
Escalante faithfully respects the number one rule of what the fantasy genre is: namely an unknown element out of the ordinary that gradually upsets the daily lives of its characters. The director also plays with one of the principles of horror cinema which is not to show the horror element in order to provoke even more suspense and terror. Except that here, Escalante systematically fails to establish suspense in his film. 
The strangeness of each shot causing suspense and anxiety in the viewer is counterbalanced by a cascade of sentimental problems in the characters, which cause the film to move away from the genre. The fantastic is here only a pretext to make a social critique of Mexican society: fear of losing one's good reputation (metaphor for the role of social networks?), criticism of the husband-wife relationship, homophobia, etc. Unfortunately, all these elements of social criticism are far too present and singled out to allow the viewer to stay in the film. In trying to do something never seen before and based on the viewer's feelings, Escalante fails to make an organic and powerful film, making a film that, in the end, turns out to be far too pompous and pretentious to be fully successful. Which is a shame, since Escalante shows that he is talented by filming strange and sometimes disturbing shots, very often involving animals (the film shows a real of animals of all species in a pond). In addition, the characters are well written and complex (special mention to the character of Angel, Alejandra's husband, a character who masks his homosexuality under a macho homophobic face) interpreted by excellent actors.
So this OFNI (Unidentified Film Object), what is it in the background? Well, it's a Mexican auteur thread, mixing alien invasion movie, Hentai (a form of Japanese pornographic film for non-connoisseurs), gay romance, and awakening to female desire. There is still a lot to say about this film. But this one, without really being considered a good film, is a real experience that is worth seeing. La Région Sauvage was released on July 19 in French cinemas.
Review by Hugo Turlan
