Aftermath / Genesis Review

After reading and covering all the hype and controversy surrounding Nacho Cerda's short films, Aftermath in particular, I finally had the chance - if that's the right word - to sit down and watch them for myself tonight. The final result? Both sides on this issue are absolutely correct. Cerda is a phenomenally gifted director, one capable of creating rich layers of meaning through visuals alone and with Aftermath he has created one of the single most unpleasant and disturbing pieces of film ever.

Unearthed's DVD has collected a trio of Nacho Cerda short films revolving around death and given them truly deluxe treatment. Though the prints show some signs of age they are in surprisingly good condition, the transfers are excellent, and the films are loaded with special features: commentaries, interviews, storyboards, anything you could possibly want. And, honestly, the attention is not undeserved. Genesis earned Cerda a Goya nomination in his native Spain, and while you may very well loathe Aftermath I don't think it's possible to write it off as nothing more than exploitation or shock for shock's sake. There is a very definite method to Cerda's madness, a definite point he aims to make.

But let's leave Aftermath for last. The first film on the disc is the much neglected The Awakening, an early black and white short not even mentioned on the front cover. Likely included for completeness' sake more than anything The Awakening is an early ten minute short that aims to capture the experience of death through the use of frozen time and surreal imagery. It tells the story of a young man who drifts into what he believes is a daydream while sitting in class and finds himself in a strange world frozen in time, where he is free to move amongst his eerily still classmates but cannot leave the room. While The Awakening lacks the finesse and style of Cerda's later work it amply proves that even at this early stage he was already thinking in terms of the big picture and struggling to understand ultimate issues.

The third film on the disc is the half hour short Genesis, a horribly tragic take on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. The film tells the story of a sculptor, grieving and plagued by nightmares, sculpting an exact lifesize replica of his wife, recently slain in a car accident. The sculpture is clearly an attempt to capture some last vestige of his wife, an attempt at making her live forever if only as a memory but things take a much darker turn. As in the myth of Pygmalion the statue begins to take on a living reality, but in this case that reality is of her horrible death. The statue begins to bleed and develops wounds matching the dead wife's and, strangely, the sculptor begins to take on those wounds as well. A surprisingly touching meditation on guilt, love and sacrifice Genesis is beautifully shot and perfectly showcases Cerda's dazzling ability to communicate without words. None of the three films here use dialogue to communicate and while you don't feel the lack in any of the three Genesis, in particular, is positively lyrical.

And now Aftermath. Ever wondered how it is that religious groups such as Christian Science and the Jehovah's Witnesses object to medical science and the practice of performing autopsies? Well, wonder no more as this film is both those group's worst nightmare brought to graphic life and a complete and absolute validation of their positions. Aftermath plays out wordlessly in the sterile world of an autopsy room. Through the first half of the thirty minute run time we simply observe as a pair of coroner's perform autopsies on a pair of male corpses. When work on those two wraps up one coroner leaves and the one remaining begins work on a female body.

Now, after years of The X Files, Six Feet Under and CSI on mainstream television you wouldn't think that observing an autopsy would have the power to shock. You are absolutely, one hundred percent wrong. This is just horribly uncomfortable stuff from the word go. Cerda's dummies are so effective that at one point there were rumors - false ones - that he had used actual corpses in the making of this film and there were later rumors that he was involved in making the alien autopsy footage that made the rounds online simply because his autopsy footage here was so convincing. If nothing else I certainly hope that every effects person that had the slightest thing to do with this film was actively recruited by every major effects shop in the world. These are absolutely flawless. But it's not so much the realism of the blood and organs that makes for uncomfortable viewing but the cold, businesslike manner in which the coroners approach their work.

Cerda likely could have stopped at the half way mark and made the point he wanted to make, but he does not. He continues and he gets far more extreme to drive the point home. When the scene is reduced down to a single male coroner working on a female corpse things immediately take on an uncomfortably voyeuristic tone. Something just seems very, very wrong in the fact that this man is laying hands on this body for any reason at all, in any context at all, and Cerda continues strongly down that road making it clear that the autopsy itself is a violation of the corpse. He then goes a step further than even that and introduces an element of necrophilia. This is very, very unpleasant.

So what is the point of all of this? How could I even sit through it? Well, what keeps Cerda out of raw exploitation territory is the film's point of view. This is not a film that asks you to empathise with or even understand the coroner. You are not at all meant to enjoy what you are seeing. If Cerda had crossed that particular line then this film would deserve all the scorn that could be heaped upon it, but he does not. This is a film about the corpses themselves. With Aftermath Cerda has crafted a shocking, brutal, back handed slap across the face to all of those who want to preserve some sort of pristine, peaceful image of what death is like. What is he saying? He is telling us that we will die and when we do we will become meat. We will be butchered and we will be powerless and, ultimately, we will be no different from dog food. It is a hard point to make - and one that is dramatically counterpointed by the much more hopeful Genesis - but it is definitely there. That said, while I can understand what Cerda is trying to do with Aftermath and appreciate it as a legitimate, if troubling, work of art I cannot possibly imagine any circumstance in which I'd say, "Gee, I'd really like to watch that again.&"

In the final analysis, is this a DVD I can recommend? Genesis I recommend wholeheartedly. It's a fantastic film that deserves a wide audience. The Awakening is certainly an interesting curiosity. Aftermath? You'll need to use your own judgement there.