Fantastic Fest XVIII Review: In F. Javier Gutierrez’s THE WAIT, Redemption Is A Devilishly-Detailed Numbers Game
Rings and Before The Fall helmer F. Javier Gutierrez’s Spanish fantasy horror thriller set in the 1970s is about as dark, cerebral and ghastly as you would hope for if this particular genre is your thing. Such is the case for The Wait, currently making the festival rounds and just recently screening for audiences at Fantastic Fest and at Germany’s 30th Internationales Filmfest Oldenburg.
If you’re just learning about this film, know that I don’t want to give away the juicier aspects of this story in my analysis, and so I’ll do my best to produce a more compact summary as you’re reading this. For all that and more, The Wait showcases an engaging lead performance by actor Victor Clavijo who stars as Eladio, an estate keeper working to provide for his wife Marcia (Ruth Diaz), as well as his son Floren (Moises Ruiz) who just turned of age and earned a title as a spotter to help guide hunters.
His employer, Don Francisco (Pedro Casablanc) is never on site to supervise anything, which emboldens Don Carlos (Manuel Moron) to offer Eladio a bribe to include more stands than the earlier agreed-upon number, totaling thirteen instead of ten. It’s a deal that means a little more money for Eladio who is reluctant to accept the bribe, but decides to when he brings his impasse to Marcia’s attention, disapproving of Eladio’s supposed timidity.
That conversation is definitely a testament to the marriage, along with a touch of foreshadowing as events unravel more than a half-hour into the film. Suddenly, tragedy strikes Eladio’s family and throws him into a downward spiral of booze, backlash, dark introspection and hellish affliction that spurs each night into a nightmare spell that’s as grisly as the discoveries he’s made within the span of an hour of the movie.
What becomes of Eladio and his plight soon reveals a rabbit hole of gruesome secrets and discoveries that will take the viewer on a journey that teeters on the edge of death, questioning the prevalence of vengeance and the chances of redemption and forgiveness. Incumbent revelations – made partly possible by the fact that despite his illiteracy, Eladio can read and interpret numbers – spark a desire for truth and even a glimmer of hope that evil will get its just dues, even given the lingering patterns preceding Eladio up to this point amid the remarkability of his endurance as it carries this story.
The Wait certainly leaves you hanging at times and wondering what each discovery means. Some of these moments include the aftermath of when Eladio unearths a mysterious box of some sort after taking a life, and when he loses his ring down the sink after trying to wash his injured hand in a seperate scene much later in the film. What you can be aptly sure of in Gutierrez’s movie is the presence of inescapable evil in an almost pact-with-the-devil sort of way, in a damming twist that compels you to hold on to some glimmer of justice regardless of the outcome.
