thesis (1996 full movie)

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Synopsis Thesis:

While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty...

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Alejandro Amenábar

Ana Torrent

Fele Martínez

Eduardo Noriega

Rosa Campillo

Miguel Picazo

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While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty... Thesis featuring Ana Torrent and Fele Martínez is available for rent or purchase on Apple TV. It's a crime and horror movie with a better than average IMDb audience rating of 7.4 (43,030 votes) and was well received by critics.

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More Information onThesis

Alejandro amenábar, ana torrent, fele martínez, eduardo noriega, xabier elorriaga, miguel picazo, nieves herranz, rosa campillo.

Padre de Ángela

Paco Hernández

Madre de Ángela

Presentadora TV

Teresa Castanedo

Conserje videoteca

José Miguel Caballero

Joserra cadiñanos.

Encargado tren

Julio Vélez

Pilar ortega, olga margallo, josé luis cuerda, emiliano otegui.

Vigilante tren

Walter Prieto

Florentino sainz, helena castañeda, mariano marín.

Ratings & Reviews

The Reelgood Score is a comprehensive weighted index designed to evaluate movie & TV quality, deriving its value from a blend of Reelgood user engagement, external ratings metrics expressed through content popularity, and user feedback, including ratings such as "loved," "liked," and "disliked." The score is presented on a scale from 1 to 100, where 100 signifies content that is highly esteemed and positively rated within the community.

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Thesis (1996)

125min - Spanish

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While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty...

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Tesis (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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• 1 Alejandro Amenabar Títulos Iniciales 1:26
• 2 Alejandro Amenabar Figueroa 1:17
• 3 Alejandro Amenabar Míralo Otra Vez 1:18
• 4 Alejandro Amenabar Bosco 2:26
• 5 Alejandro Amenabar Persecución 3:17
• 6 Alejandro Amenabar Sueño 3:29
• 7 Alejandro Amenabar Investigando 1:08
• 8 Alejandro Amenabar Castro 1:57
• 9 Alejandro Amenabar Snuff 1:29
• 10 Alejandro Amenabar La Princesa y el Enano 5:48
• 11 Alejandro Amenabar Beso en la Discoteca 0:41
• 12 Alejandro Amenabar El Parque 0:44
• 13 Alejandro Amenabar Ángela Encuentra la Cámara 2:08
• 14 Alejandro Amenabar La Casa de Bosco 2:04
• 15 Alejandro Amenabar Pelea en la Cocina 1:19
• 16 Alejandro Amenabar El Garaje 1:17
• 17 Alejandro Amenabar Me Van a Matar 1:13
• 18 Alejandro Amenabar El Hospital 1:05
• 19 Alejandro Amenabar Títulos Finales 2:33
• Cast & Crew
• Screenshots
• Technical Data

Videos Stills Posters Promo Screenshots Covers

In November 1995, Ángela, a university student in Madrid, is planning to write a thesis on audiovisual violence and the family. Her commuter train is evacuated after a man commits suicide by jumping in front of the train. While being led out of the station, Ángela moves toward the tracks in an attempt to see the man's remains. At her school, Ángela asks her thesis director, Professor Figueroa, to help her find the most violent films in the school's library, and seeks out a fellow student, Chema, who is known for collecting violent and pornographic videos. While Ángela watches a violent film with Chema, Figueroa finds a tape hidden in the school's audiovisual archives. The next day, Ángela finds Figueroa dead of an apparent asthma attack in the screening room and retrieves the tape. A younger professor, Castro, takes over the supervision of Ángela's thesis project. At Chema's house, Ángela discovers the stolen tape is a snuff film in which a woman is tortured, killed, and disemboweled. Chema recognizes the victim is a student from their university named Vanessa, who went missing two years previously. He is able to determine that the killer used a specific model of Sony camera with a digital zoom feature, and that the film was shot in someone's garage.

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Critique: 2

(The) director Alejandro Amenábar balances actual, terrifying visuals with Hitchcockian red herrings for one of the best debut films in years. The...

Despite some whopping improbabilities – would snuff movie producers really hide their master tapes in a university storage room? -"Thesis...

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While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty…

The chilling first feature from the master of psychological thrillers, The Others director Alejandro Amenábar, examines society’s insatiable obsession with violent imagery. Located in the sleazy underworld of amateur snuff films, this tense, creepy campus-set thriller is rife with unsettling turns.

Cast & Crew

Ana Torrent

Fele Martínez

Eduardo Noriega

Rosa Campillo

Miguel Picazo

• Average 6.8

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• Thesis (1996) watch32

Thesis (1996)

While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty…

Genre: Horror ,  Thriller

Director: Alejandro Amenábar , Mateo Gil

Actors: Ana Torrent , Eduardo Noriega , Fele Martínez , Miguel Picazo , Nieves Herranz , Paco Hernández , Rosa Ávila , Rosa Campillo , Teresa Castanedo , Xabier Elorriaga

Duration: 125

Release: 1996

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• Movies for the Masses Joseph Proimakis mia filodoksi apopeira sholioy sti bia toy mesoy poy ypiretei [o skino8etis], ton tropo poy ayti hrisimopoieitai os opioyho skeyasma, kai etsi gia ton habale, ton symbolismo toy ergaleioy poy koybalaei ston omo toy (os ergaleio apokalypsis tis alitheias,
• Goatdog's Movies Michael W. Phillips, Jr. The thinking man's 8mm.
• Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus Bryant Frazer Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenbar ('Open Your Eyes') is already in his element with this low-budget thriller debut.
• PopMatters Imran Khan Tesis won't exactly knock the socks off of viewers; However, it is exceptionally acted, with all actors delivering solid performances and fully submitting to the demands of some of the more arduous action sequences.
• MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman It only manages to be startling in passing.
• Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz The young director has an exciting way of filming and keeping one engrossed in the story...
• Rolling Stone Jason Newman (The) director Alejandro Amenábar balances actual, terrifying visuals with Hitchcockian red herrings for one of the best debut films in years. The technology might be quaint, but the fear remains resonant.
• AV Club Scott Tobias Amenábar dodges the moral hysteria and hypocritical prurience that infected Joel Schumacher's 8mm three years later, and his cinephilia suffuses the film in mostly exciting ways.
• Variety Joe Leydon Despite some whopping improbabilities - would snuff movie producers really hide their master tapes in a university storage room? -"Thesis" generates genuine tension

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Tesis / Thesis (1996 Movie): Summary & Analysis

Summary: .

Film student Ángela is writing her thesis on violence in audiovisual media. At the university, she discovers the body of her thesis director, Prof. Figueroa, who died while watching a video that turns out to be a snuff film. The plot of this psychological thriller unfolds through Ángela’s research on the disappearance of a former classmate, tortured and murdered on tape. Unsure about whom to trust, Ángela is targeted as the next victim as she draws closer to exposing an underground ring of snuff films produced by a fellow student and professor. Set in the 1990s, the film engages a critique of violence in television and film, market forces producing audiovisual media, and voyeuristic desires of audiences, as well as the burgeoning practices of security camera vigilance in public spaces. 

Amenábar’s feature-length debut, a psychological thriller of the intrigue genre about ‘snuff’ film, is in many ways an exploration into the darkest underside of the demand for spectacle in which visual media are produced, whether for television or film. As the film student Ángela pursues research for her thesis on audiovisual violence (‘a daily occurrence in film and television’), her desire to view footage all too graphic to appear in the media is eclipsed by the dangers of exposing an underground ring of snuff films produced in the university. It is this turn from Ángela’s interest in viewing graphic violence to the threat that she herself could become the next victim of a snuff film which structures the narrative for viewers, similarly to the genre of a detective thriller whodunit, in which all relationships outside the family are suspect. The ensuing intrigue confronts viewers with complex questions about spectatorship itself in which the morbid interest in seeing tortured and mutilated bodies censored from the public eye is satisfied by an underground market that must ‘give the audience what it wants to see’, as Professor Castro (one author of the snuff ring) lectures to his film students. In this sense, the notion of desire constructed in the film is understood as a complex, intersecting terrain of psychological, market-driven, and sociocultural factors which generate, at once, the spectator’s libidinal desire to consume censored images, an underground market of snuff film produced in response to the demand for violence, and the gendered roles of the characters as either objects or perpetrators of this violence, among others. The demand for morbid images, in other words, exists within a market economy inseparable from the characters’ fascination with and horror for ‘real’ explicit visual material that is censored or in the case of Ángela’s research subject, conspicuous in the media. 

Notably, it is only once Ángela perceives that she is being pursued as the next victim of the snuff ring, as the very object of filmed violence which both terrifies and intrigues her, that her desire to view graphic images begins to wane, leading her to abandon her research altogether by the end of the film. Nevertheless, Ángela’s ambiguous transformation from a subject who desires to see recorded violence to become herself a target of ‘real’ violence is not entirely clear given that Amenábar constructs desire for his audience in less simplistic terms.1 Viewers are shown images of Ángela peeking through her fingers to catch a glimpse of the filmed horror that so fascinates her, an ambivalence which is evidently more complex in her character’s psychological portrait. For, Ángela also fantasises about a sexual encounter with the suspect Bosco in a disturbing dream sequence which oscillates between Ángela’s terrified resistance to her aggressor, who subdues her in bed with a suggestive phallic switchblade, and her erotic attempt held at knifepoint to seduce Bosco, which could be read as a survival tactic were it not for the director’s choice to portray this scene disturbingly with evident lust. To her horror, a dreaming Ángela realises that she is being filmed during the sex act, as an object of desire targeted for annihilation, which draws a clear parallel for the film’s viewers between woman as object in pornography and the brutal victimisation of the innocent in snuff. This parallel is furthermore reinforced by an earlier shot of the university film catalogue in which hardcore ‘pornography and other films’ (snuff) are categorised and archived together. The dream sequence, along with the late revelation that Ángela has been filmed secretly at home by her co-researcher Chema – a recording in which she caresses and kisses the image of Bosco displayed on the television screen – emphasises the perverse trappings of a desire through which Ángela’s character, unknown to the film’s audience, had demonstrated a conscious, invested sexual interest in the suspect Bosco, caught on tape. The voyeuristic recording likewise exposes her projected desire for simulacrum in the form of images (in film, television), a scene with greater social implications than Ángela’s character portrait alone. Sexual desire is played out similarly in displaced ways among other characters, in Bosco’s attempt to seduce Ángela’s unsuspecting younger sister, in Ángela’s ‘feigned’ kiss with Bosco in order to distance her sister from the suspected assassin, in the alleged jealousy of Bosco’s girlfriend towards Ángela, in Chema’s voyeuristic recording of Ángela, and even between men in Bosco and Chema’s former friendship which remained a secret to Ángela, a suspicious matter when this bond was revealed to her by Bosco’s girlfriend. 

In this sense, Ángela’s confession earlier in the film ‘I don’t like to be recorded’ echoes Amenábar’s recurrent questioning of camera vigilance and its blurred distinction between the public eye and private intimacy, whether subjects are deliberately filmed, as in these scenes, or passively recorded by the university’s security cameras which provide evidence to incriminate Ángela in the discovery of Professor Figueroa’s dead body in the auditorium. Viewers might draw an immediate comparison between the growing presence of security cameras in public space at the time of the film’s release and Amenábar’s critique of camera vigilance, both public and private. Moving beyond this initial assessment, the film also suggests that even when institutional vigilance is justified under the guise of security (i.e., mandated by the university or state), and thereby presumably void of subjective interest, a voyeuristic desire indeed underpins authority and serves to both conserve and usurp it; as viewers will remember, the closed circuit cameras incriminate Ángela, but also film Professor Castro’s suspicious lurking presence in the university film archive before Figueroa’s death. 

In its increasingly muddied distinction between the public and private, intimacy and vigilance, the film also problematises the strict separation between access to mediated (recorded or simulated) violence in the form of images and ‘real violence’ experienced in the first person.2 Viewers are reminded throughout the film that any absolute distinction between the ‘mediated’ and the ‘real’ – whether desire, violent images, or otherwise – is ultimately ungrounded. Ángela asks Chema if he has ever seen a real dead body, which gives way to two interpretations: Chema asserts that he has, in the explicit video recordings he watches with Ángela, and yet to the contrary, for Ángela audiovisual violence is not ‘real’ per se (she argues, ‘not on television, but a real dead body’). From the film’s opening sequence in a train station, in which Ángela approaches the train tracks desiring to view a ‘body split in two’ that is never actually seen (through the camera that occupies her first-person gaze), Amenábar structures the film’s imagery, and at times Ángela’s sight, through similar camerawork that seldom shows significant footage of gore, if at all.3 Instead, the characters’ horror is transmitted to the audience through shots of their expressions when viewing the snuff film and, most importantly, through the viewer’s psychological response when imagining violent images through the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, particularly in the victim’s chilling screams for help as she is being tortured. In fact, Amenábar’s choice not to show viewers significant violence or gore, but rather to play on the viewer’s horror by imagining this violence through sound, is perhaps most noteworthy for film students interested in Amenábar’s use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in conjunction with the full omission of visual information (i.e. established as a motif in the opening sequence with a recorded voice-off which fades to the first frame).4 Chema and Ángela’s tense adventure into the cellar of the university archives, equipped with only a box of matches that must be lit consecutively, also plays with the audience’s ability to see only the duration of each lighted match, interspersed with shots of complete darkness which play upon the viewer’s expectations of surprise in the thriller genre. Such is the nature of Ángela’s psychological, imaginative horror when she chooses not to view the snuff film, at first, but darkens her television screen through the contrast function so that only the audio recording can be heard, which proves disturbing for her character in later scenes, as she listens obsessively to the film’s audio recording on her portable tape recorder. 

Nevertheless, it should be noted that when violent images are shown to the film’s viewers, Amenábar often chooses to demonstrate the characters’ ability to analyse them critically. For, the rapid advances in digital camera technology at the time are what lead Chema and Ángela to deduce the brand of camera used to record the snuff film, through a close analysis of the recording’s image quality, as well as the camera’s date of release and purchase, which would serve as vital information to track down Professor Castro and Bosco as leaders of the snuff ring. Chema and Ángela furthermore provide a ‘close visual reading’ of the quick jump cuts in post-production editing, which aim to delete the victim’s mention of her torturer’s name, allowing them to conclude that the victim knows her murderer. It could be argued that these two fundamental pieces of information, used to crack the case, are derived from the protagonists’ critical analysis of graphic images, providing a similar key to Amenábar’s proposal for his viewers to deconstruct their own relationship to violence with critical reflection. 

One should note that the word morbo used to describe Ángela’s ‘morbid’ desire to view extreme, violent images, is defined in Spanish as both ‘an unhealthy interest in persons or things’ and ‘an attraction to unpleasant events’. In this sense, the film’s dark reflection on spectatorship and the morbid fascination with explicit images in the media may be traced to the film’s release, contemporary to the upsurge in violence in Spanish cinema at the time, noted by Jordan and MorganTamosunas, Klodt, Moreiras-Menor and Tierney, among others, as well as the flourishing of the first private television networks in Spain in the 1990s. Summarised in the market-driven maxim of Professor Castro on the film industry, to provide viewers literally with what they most desire to see, programming in commercial television is largely dependent upon the number of viewers in a given audience share, supported by advertising spots (see Maxwell 1995). It is no surprise that Amenábar closes the film, then, with a sequence of images from a fictitious sensationalist news show, Justice and Law, whose anchor summarises the ‘unbelievable’ and ‘macabre’ story of gruesome murders of disappeared girls found on tape. Framing for her audience that it is ‘not easy for us to show these images,’ the anchor both conditions the viewer’s expectations before seeing the footage (‘and now, the images you’ve been waiting for’) and justifies the broadcast as ‘a document by itself’, unmediated and lacking critical analysis. In this final sequence, the camera shows Chema and Ángela walking through the hallway of a hospital, interspersed with images of patients fixated on the same television broadcast, a suggestive critique of a greater social desire to view violence in televised media, which is not altogether unique to Spain.5 Keeping in mind the film’s potential to question intimacy, vigilance, and the increasingly blurry distinction between the public and private – a more subtle gesture than the explicit nature of extreme violence in the film’s exploration of snuff – one could conclude in this final scene that Amenábar proposes a greater social critique of the production of and desire to consume images in a market-driven economy that jettisons ethical considerations in favour of audience share or box office revenue. In other words, the viewing audience most desires to consume, with morbid fascination, not only violence but voyeurism in which private matters are made public – the form of television programming that defines sensationalist news media and the gossip varieties of popular talk shows that turn the intimate details of private lives into spectacle-driven commodities for mass consumption. After all, perhaps summarised most disturbingly for the film’s viewers, when Ángela kisses the television screen, her secret desire for the assassin is only made public, terrifyingly and intriguingly so for the viewing audience, when caught on tape. 

Notes 

1. As Cristina Moreiras-Menor argues, ‘Lejos … de ser una película que trabaja exclusivamente en torno a la mirada fascinada del sujeto contemporáneo hacia la violencia, Tesis va más allá al exponer tanto su razón, la espectacularización masiva e indiferencia de la realidad, como su origen, la formación del sujeto y la manipulación de su mirada a la realidad a partir de procesos simbólicos de educación asentados fundamentalmente en estructuras de poder (institucionalizadas) que privilegian la espectacularización consumista del lado más sórdido de la naturaleza humana y social’ [Far … from being a film that works exclusively around the fascinated gaze of the contemporary subject towards violence, Tesis goes beyond this to expose both its raison d’être, mass spectacularization and indifference towards reality, and its origin, the formation of the subject and manipulation of the subject’s view of reality from symbolic processes of education seated fundamentally in (institutionalized) structures of power that privilege consumerist spectacularization of human and social nature’s most sordid side.] (Moreiras-Menor 2002: 260). 

2. See Dolores Tierney, ‘The Appeal of the Real in Snuff: Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis (“Thesis”)’, Spectator – The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 2002, pp. 45–55. 

3. As Amenábar notes, ‘opté por el camino opuesto, mirando hacia el otro lado, a la cara de los actores, jugando con la proyección psicológica del espectador, con lo que no está viendo, con lo que se está imaginando’ [I chose the opposite route, looking the other way, at the actors’ faces, playing with the psychological projection of the viewer, with what one is not seeing, with what one is imagining.] (Marchante 2002: 59). 

4. See Dominique Russell, ‘Sounds like Horror: Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis on AudioVisual Violence’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 81–95. 

5. See Jason E. Klodt, ‘En el fondo te gusta: Titillation, Desire, and the Spectator’s Gaze in Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2007, pp. 3–17. 

Cast and Crew:

[Country: Spain. Production Company: Las Producciones del Escorpión and SOGEPAQ. Director: Alejandro Amenábar. Executive producers: José Luis Cuerda and Emiliano Otegui. Screenwriters: Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Cinematographer: Hans Burmann. Music: Alejandro Amenábar and Mariano Marín. Editor: María Elena Sáinz de Rozas. Cast: Ana Torrent (Ángela), Fele Martínez (Chema), Eduardo Noriega (Bosco Herranz), Xabier Elorriaga (Castro), Miguel Picazo (Figueroa), Nieves Herranz (Sena), Rosa Campillo (Yolanda).] 

Further Reading 

Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998. 

Oti Rodríguez Marchante, Amenábar, vocación de intriga, Madrid, Páginas de Espuma, 2002. 

Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair (eds), Gender and Spanish Cinema, Oxford and New York, Berg, 2004. 

Rosanna Maule, ‘Cultural Specificity and Transnational Address in the New Generation of Spanish Film Authors: The Case of Alejandro Amenábar’, in Cristina Sánchez-Conejero (ed.), Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th-21st Century, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2007, pp. 107–20. 

Richard Maxwell, The Spectacle of Democracy: Spanish Television, Nationalism, and Political Transition, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minneapolis Press, 1995. 

Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Cultura herida: Literatura y cine en la España democrática, Madrid, Ediciones Libertarias, 2002. 

Joan Ramon Resina (ed.), Burning Darkness: A Half Century of Spanish Cinema, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2008. 

Paul Julian Smith, Television in Spain, from Franco to Almodóvar, Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, New York, Tamesis, 2006. 

Source Credits:

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.

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Snuff movies, true-crime TV shows and other forms of violent entertainment figure heavily in restrained thriller about a film student who becomes the star in her own life-or-death drama. Newcomer Alejandro Amenabar provides an inventive plot and a sufficient supply of red herrings. Could click in the international video market with savvy handling.

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Snuff movies, true-crime TV shows and other forms of violent entertainment figure heavily in the plot of “Thesis,” a surprisingly restrained thriller about a film student who becomes the star in her own life-or-death drama. Newcomer Alejandro Amenabar provides an inventive plot and a sufficient supply of red herrings, but fails to sustain suspense in the pic’s draggy second half. Theatrical prospects are iffy. Even so, “Thesis” could click in the international video market with savvy handling.

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Ana Torrent is well cast as Angela, a Madrid film student who wants to write her thesis on violence in movies. Her faculty adviser offers to help by searching the university’s archives for violent videos. Unfortunately, he wanders into a secret storage room and picks up an unmarked videocassette, and he’s shocked into a fatal heart attack while viewing the tape.

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Angela discovers her mentor dead in a university screening room. Impulsively, she steals the tape he was watching. At home, she discovers the video is a recording of the torture-murder of a co-ed who disappeared three years earlier.

Rather than alert the police, Angela decides to investigate on her own. She seeks info about violent video from an eccentric classmate, Chema (Fele Martinez), an avid fan of porno and splatter movies. He looks at the snuff video and immediately recognizes that it was shot with a special model of video camera. Just a few days later, Angela spots one of those cameras in the hands of a handsome student, Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), who just happens to know the long-missing co-ed.

Amenabar effectively develops a slow-simmering attraction between Angela and Bosco, slyly hinting that she may be drawn to him because of the danger he possibly represents. Meanwhile, Chema fumes jealously and does a great deal to arouse audience suspicion. Other prime suspects include Castro (Javier Elorriaga), Angela’s new faculty adviser; and Yolanda (Rosa Campillo), Bosco’s possessive girlfriend.

Despite some whopping improbabilities — would snuff movie producers really hide their master tapes in a university storage room? –“Thesis” generates genuine tension. Pic also manages a few pointed comments about the relationship between violence and voyeurism, particularly in a final scene that has the host of a Spanish tabloid TV show warning viewers that they’re about to see a clip from a snuff movie. The viewers appear to be raptly attentive.

Torrent manages the difficult trick of seeming intelligent even when her character does some pretty dumb things. Martinez is aptly ambiguous in his portrayal of the surly Chema.

Hans Burmann’s moody cinematography is a major asset. Other tech values are first-rate.

According to pic’s production notes, Amenabar is, at 23, the youngest feature filmmaker in Spain. It will be interesting to see whether he can fulfill the promise he displays here.

• Production: A Las Productions del Escorpion production. Produced by Jose Luis Cuerda. Executive producer, Emiliano Otegui Piedra. Directed, written by Alejandro Amenabar.
• Crew: Camera (color), Hans Burmann; editor , Maria Elena Saenz De Rozas; music, Amenabar, Mariano Marin; art direction, Wolfgang Burmann; sound (Dolby), Goldstein & Steinberg; assistant director, Walter Prieto. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Panorama), Feb. 16, 1996. Running time: 125 MIN.
• With: Angela ... Ana Torrent Chema ...Fele Martinez Bosco ... Eduardo Noriega Sena ... Nieves Harranz Yolanda ... Rosa Campillo Figueroa ... Miguel Picazo Castro ... Javier Elorriaga

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Film review: tesis (1996).

Phil Russell 07/10/2020 Extreme Cinema , Film Reviews

Angela (Ana Torrent), is a grad student writing her thesis on violent video. She gets in contact with Chema (Fele Martinez), a long haired horror geek who takes her home and introduces her to his collection of gore tapes. He plays her a mondo movie calle ‘Fresh Blood’, which shows a dead body having its brain removed. Angela’s professor has access to the university’s private video library, and he promises to have a look through the archives to locate the most gruesome and p*rnographic films to help her in her studies. After browsing the shelves in the enormous deserted library, he plays one of the videos in a closed-off screening room… Angela later finds him dead in his seat, presumably of a chronic asthma attack. But what on earth was he watching that could cause him to keel over like that? Angela removes the tape from the machine and watches it at home. She’s hesitant at first, making sure she plays it with the contrast level turned down to a minimum so that she doesn’t have to see what’s happening on screen; but the sounds of a woman’s tortured cries are enough to convince her that the contents of the tape are far from pretty, and could in fact be a genuine snuff film. She shows the tape to her horror geek buddy, Chema, and he confirms it is real. The tape depicts a young woman tied to a chair being beaten and butchered with a circular saw by a man wearing a balaclava. Chema recognises the victim as a girl who disappeared from the campus two years previously. This odd couple then take it upon themselves to investigate…

Directed by Alejandro Amenabar Starring: Ana Torrent, Fele Martinez Original title: Tesis

After this superb initial set-up, the film descends into a silly thriller in which the sleuths are followed by the murderers who made the tape. And with only two possible culprits at hand, the film flits between the suspects, back and forth, and ruins any chances of having a surprise ending. As a whole, Tesis is not really gritty or graphic enough for my liking. It’s way too clean-cut and streamlined to truly disturb its audience. It serves as really nothing more than a calling card for director Amenabar, who predictably went on to such mainstream tosh as the Turn of The Screw rip-off, The Others, and the Penelope Cruz vehicle, Open Your Eyes. And like those later films, Thesis has a distinctive ‘play-it-safe’ vibe about it, as though the filmmakers were trying to secure an international hit at any cost, and were absolutely dead-set against including anything in the film that may have ruined its chances of sending the director on to a career in Hollywood. The snuff thriller was done much better – and more plausibly – in Anthony Waller’s superb Mute Witness (1994), and just like Amenabar, Waller also went on to a career in Hollywood, and delivered the lacklustre sequel, An American Werewolf In Paris, of which the less spoken about the better.

Angela’s character is a bit wishy-washy; she’s supposed to be writing a thesis on video violence, but acts as though she’s never seen a horror movie in her life. She has a sort of doe-eyed innocence about her, more suited to watching Disney movies than fictional mondo vids like ‘Fresh Blood’. If she ever saw Men Behind The Sun or Snuff 102 she’d shit her own guts out. Chema is better as a character, the horror geek whose jaded sensibilities allows him to identify the poor butchered girl, meaning he can watch the tape over and over like a detached criminologist, as a way of piecing together the clues needed to track down the culprits. But even he is annoyingly obnoxious at times. His abnormal facial hair is annoying too; like a piece of shredded wheat pathetically trying to mimic Fidel Castro. And with his grungy plaid shirt and long hair and glasses, he looks like fellow horror geek, Mark Borchardt, from the excellent documentary American Movie: The Making of North Western, which incidentally, was made around the same time as Thesis .

The film’s plus points are quite subtle; the first half hour or so has a gripping build-up, but soon fizzles out. There is also an underlying theme present concerning the scoptophiliac nature of moviegoers and of human nature in general: The opening scene sees Angela arriving at the station on a train. The conductor announces that a man has committed suicide by throwing himself in front of the train, and urges passengers not to look at the track as they leave. While she walks on the platform, Angela seems troubled; she doesn’t want to look at the dead body on the track, but at the same time she can’t help herself – the desire to look and feast her eyes on the tragedy is too great for her… Later on, there’s the scene where Chema watches the tape at his apartment – While Chema stares unflinchingly at the screen in an almost clinically detached manner, Angela stands at the back of the room with her hands covering her eyes. But while she’s doing this, she can’t help but take a horrified peek through the gaps of her fingers. By standing as far away from the screen as possible, she hopes to distance herself, both physically and emotionally, from the shocking imagery, but of course this doesn’t work, and those images are burned into her memory forever. An idea many horror fans will be able to relate to.

Tesis (1996)

Tags Alejandro Amenábar Ana Torrent Eduardo Noriega Fele Martínez Halálos tézis Miguel Picazo mute witness open your eyes snuff thriller spanish giallo spanish horror Tesis The Others Thesis Xabier Elorriaga

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Thesis (1996)

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