Aftermath

Happy Valentines!

So I figured I'd start with something relatively brief.  As this film runs just about half an hour,  there isn't much time wasted.  As someone who isn't big on overlong films (read:has a burnt out attention span), this seemed like a good idea.

I was surprised to see that this was made by the same guy who directed 2006's The Abandoned.  That movie, while atmospheric, wasn't really that compelling in my opinion and I never finished watching it.  Watching it with commercials in standard definition probably didn't help. Maybe I should give it another try.  Anyway, Aftermath is lean and mean.  Whether or not it was Nacho Cerda's original intent to make this as a short film or feature length, its brevity works to its advantage.

The early scenes in Aftermath are of 2 male bodies being dissected.  Organs are removed and put in jars or on scales.  Leftover body parts are stuffed back into the open chest cavity, which is then sewn shut.  Pretty grim stuff, especially considering how good the special effects are, but nothing too out of the ordinary.  It's when one of the doctors finds himself alone with another body in the morgue - a woman - that things get repulsive in a hurry. I found myself wincing and looking away and then later feeling disgusted.  I suppose that's what Cerda was going for.  On one hand, all of the bodies in this movie were already dead to start with and no matter what degree of indignities they were subjected to, they would have remained dead.  On the other hand, it's awful to imagine the things done to that poor dead woman being done to anyone, dead or not.

It's weird to see something that could conceivably be called "art" (beautiful music, rich colors, deliberate pacing) that's also about corpse-fucking and feeding ground up human organs to domestic pets.

Tomorrow:Cutting Moments