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It’s uncomfortable, and icky, and polarizing, and fascinating all at once, particularly given the artistry on display in both Villaronga’s very determined use of colour (cool blues and blacks with occasional pops of red) and the symbolism of various cages, which keep these characters imprisoned within rooms, machines, the house and, of course, their own horrific trauma.
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The story suggests the “changing of the guard” where the student takes over from the master. In this respect the film is reminiscent of the Stephen King novella “Apt Pupil,” adapted to the screen in 1998 by Bryan Singer, in which an adolescent discovers that an old man living in his neighborhood is a Nazi war criminal, and, rather than expose him, blackmails him into recounting his Nazi crimes in all their vivid detail.
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A second possible reading elaborates on the first by adding a reflexive element centered on the act of watching. In such films the act of murder is in one or several ways aligned with the pleasure of watching, scopophilia (pleasure in the act of voyeurism), and is directly inscribed in the text.
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The third possible source of meaning in the film is figurative rather than literal, and involves placing it within the context of Spain’s social-cultural-political history. [...]
During the Francoist era, the depiction of violence was repressed, as was the depiction of sex, sacrilege, and politics; this repression helps explain why eroticized violence could be used so effectively by the anti-Francoist opposition to speak a political discourse, that is, to expose the legacy of brutality and torture that lay hidden behind the surface beauty of the Fascist and neo-Catholic aesthetics. (Kinder, p. 138).
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