‘Death Has No Master’ movie review: Asia Argento plays a woman competing with unwanted housemates in the light-hearted Venezuelan drama

Featuring powerful atmospheric music, sound design, and a sense of tropical setting such that one might worry about developing crotch rot after watching, this is the third feature film from Venezuelan writer-director Jorge Thelen Armand. Death has no masterHe dresses well but doesn’t really go anywhere.

Knowing that his previous works are complete, La Soledad and no Fortaleza (Constancy), she was similarly agile in movement but strikingly moody. Yet, somehow, their artistic idiosyncrasies seemed bolder. Given that this is his first outing with a relatively famous star — Asia Argento, who plays a woman returning from Europe to Venezuela to sell her late father’s cocoa farm — expectations may have been fueled by irrational fury that he might somehow raise his game. But the final product never reaches a boil, despite the promising boil of the first act.

After an ominous, perhaps dream/possibly flashback sequence that’s never fully explained, which finds Argento’s heroine Caro in a ravine where a blood-covered, masked man (Roberto Conde) encourages her to kill another (David Tiburcio), the action suddenly shifts to Caro, newly landed in the country. After the cops stop her looking for a quick bribe, her driver assures her that Venezuela is safer now that they’ve killed all the criminals.

She’s not entirely reassured, but at least she has the deeds to her father’s house where she grew up after meeting her lawyer Roque (Jorge Tellen Hedrich, father of the director and star of the film). La Fortaleza), Caro arrives at the dilapidated mansion. A stone building decorated with relief Corinthian columns with interiors filled with parquet floors and shabby chic Victorian furniture, the house at this point is barely separated from the encroaching tropical jungle surrounding it. No wonder Rocky warns her that the house and surrounding land are not worth the million dollars she expects; She’d be lucky if she brought half that.

But home improvement is the least of Caro’s worries. There are several people living in the house, apparently under the supervision of Sonia (Dojrica Tovar, a non-professional with an incredible screen presence). Sonia remembers Caro from the good old days when she worked for Caro’s father, was in the house for years, and lives there now with her son Maiko (Yerman Sequeira, another discovery), a kid old enough to be in elementary school if he were only enrolled in one. The tenant (José Aponte) rents a room from Sonia and may sometimes share her bed, while old tenant Yoni (Arturo Rodriguez) also manages the property, especially the farm. Fortunately, his loyalties lie more with Caro, and she is in luck as things quickly deteriorate between Caro and Sonia when the former tells the latter that she will have to move out so Caro can sell the property.

Not that we see her walking into estate agents or even doing much about dead papers everywhere. After spending a lot of time in bed and looking at obscure books of illustrations that her father left lying between his Chekovian rifle and machete, Caro moves to the city for a while to stay in a hotel and plot with Rocky on how to get rid of Sonia. The police clearly won’t help, claiming that Sonia has a right to stay where she is after having lived there for more than five years, and in any case, she has other legal claims to the place.

All of this was supposedly filmed long before US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro earlier this year, not that the kidnapping had much of an impact on the country’s regime. But it is clear from the attitude of the locals that no one likes an arrogant and arrogant person Gringa Like Caro around these parts, at least the one who struts around in leather boots and a gaucho hat like she owns the place. Well, yes, it technically has, but it’s not a good look here, where the travails of colonial rule are well remembered. As one policewoman pointed out, all she was missing was a whip. (Don’t worry, there’s also a whip in the house, which will play an important role in the story.)

Argento has enough instinctive brutality to make her blend well with less experienced actors, but this isn’t one of her best performances and the character is too underwritten. The score and music by Sylvain Bellemare and Vittorio Giampietro, respectively, have to work extra hard to make it sound like something is going to happen, eventually, and it’s not going to be pretty. It gets the job done, but it doesn’t provide a completely satisfying viewing experience.