Arrebato — released in Spain in 1979 and largely unseen outside it for decades — is one of those films that exists in a category of one. It is not a horror film in any useful sense, though its final five minutes deliver genuine dread. It is not a drug film, though heroin is everywhere. It is a film about the act of watching films, about what happens when the screen starts watching back. Director Iván Zulueta gives us José (Eusebio Poncela), a failing horror director strung out on heroin, barely holding together a co-dependent domestic arrangement with Ana (Cecilia Roth). He is introduced to Pedro (Will More), an eccentric cousin of his ex's aunt, who wanders country estates in a heavy overcoat in summer heat, shooting endless Super 8 footage. Pedro has attached a timer to his camera. He has begun filming himself asleep. Strange single red frames have started appearing, uninvited. The film's central conceit — that the camera itself develops volition, that the act of filming produces a rapture that substitutes for and eventually surpasses the heroin high — is where Zulueta earns his strangeness. This is not metaphor dressed as plot. Zulueta treats it with total literalness, and the film's slow, enveloping dread comes from watching the boundary between filmmaker and film dissolve in real time. Pedro's Warholian time-lapse self-portraits are genuinely eerie in a way that most found footage or meta-cinema never achieves. The Pedro Almodóvar connection is real and not incidental. Almodóvar did voice-overdubbing for a female character here, and Zulueta and he maintained their connection afterward. The DNA is legible: the double-stranded narrative, the queer energy, Cecilia Roth (who would become an Almodóvar repertory fixture), the extended flashback structure, the 'cinemania' — a character's word in the film — as both subject and affliction. Arrebato reads now as a kind of generative ground zero for a whole strand of Spanish cinema, which makes its long obscurity strange and its arrival on Mubi overdue. The performances are uneven. There is, as the review notes, some pop-eyed silent-movie acting from one lead that tests patience. The jittery near-silence of the opening ten minutes will shed viewers who came for conventional horror. The longueurs are real. But the images Zulueta builds toward — a Betty Boop doll apparently accelerating a television broadcast, a penis becoming erect cut against a cigarette's long ash burning out — have the logic of genuine nightmare rather than shock-cut provocation. They are horribly inspired, as one observer correctly puts it. Poncela carries the film with the same quality he brought to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intact (2001), where he played a man who drains luck from winning gamblers for Max von Sydow's casino. He has a haughty, doomy aura — someone who exists slightly outside the normal distribution of human affect. That quality is exactly right for José, a director whose 'magnetic halo' is described as generated not by belief but by hatred of the craft, which is its own kind of negative theology. Arrebato is streaming on Mubi from 1 October. It is not for everyone — almost aggressively not for everyone — but for the right viewer, it is one of those films that reorders your sense of what the medium is for.
