The Last Circus (Alex de la Iglesia, 2010)

When I walked out of this I told the first person I talked to that it made me want to cry and throw up at the same time, but in a good way. The unexpected emotional gut punch of the film floored me. I could barely speak. While the effort towards macabre jokes actually does some work to undermine the film's powers and strengths, it's possible that going so far out on a limb as to not be able to recognize what works and what doesn't is part of what gave de la Iglesia the ability to make such a terrifying piece of filmmaking in the first place.

The film is, above all, rooted in its place as being part of the end of the Franco era in Spain. Admittedly, this is an era I don't know much about, other than what everyone knows: socialists and anarchists fought the fascists in the '30s and lost, Franco rules the country after that for something like 40 years. But something about the deconstruction/rabid demolition of fantasy taking place in this movie is obviously strongly influenced by the feelings de la Iglesia must've felt growing up around this time. In some ways, this movie is the perfect antidote to the terrible, hideous Pan's Labyrinth, which also involves both fantasy and fascism, but with a much more ickily unearned hopefulness, suggesting that in times of terrible atrocity the only option we have is to escape into fantasy. This completely dismantles that notion, using a seemingly sweet stereotypical movie dork guy, who falls in love with a beautiful woman and must find a way to woo her away from her terrible, abusive boyfriend as the starting point for a movie that gets increasingly more horrific and frightening, culminating in a fairly audacious setpiece reminiscent of Hitchcock's North by Northwest finale, though more effective (especially if, like me, you happen to be afraid of heights). Alex de la Iglesia suggests the exact opposite of Guillermo del Toro's seriously terrible "fairy tale for adults" -- that the only way to truly survive in horrific conditions is to look without flinching and not let yourself be lost in a fantasy.