Madrid. Jose is a film director completing the final scene of a horror film in which a vampire woman looks directly into the camera. Jose returns to his apartment, gets high on heroin and spots his girlfriend Ana sleeping in his bed. Jose receives a film reel and an audio cassette of a man he knew, Pedro, a reclusive guy who is making film clips. Jose remembers he met Pedro through Jose's then girlfriend Marta, and showed him how to use time-lapse photography. Pedro is overwhelmed and makes several fast-motion film clips. Pedro films himself sleeping with a camera in time-lapse, but notices a red frame is missing. Pedro goes to sleep again, but the camera moves to the left towards Marta sitting, and then she disappears. Jose goes to Pedro's apartment and develops his film. Jose notices Pedro disappeared and was also "swallowed" by the camera, only a few frames of Pedro's face remaining. Jose goes to the bed, the camera turns towards him, and then Jose also disappears and becomes part of the film reel.
Even though it was voted in a national poll by magazine Caiman Cuadernos de Cine as one of the top 10 best Spanish films of the 20th century, Ivan Zulueta's final feature length film "Arrebato" is a too obscure patchwork to truly work. Overlong and overstretched, without a clear plot, "Arrebato" is fundamentally a movie about making movies, an ode to cinema and people who get so carried away with it that their life practically becomes a movie, which is hinted at in the surreal ending. Zulueta crafts aesthetic images consisting of close-up shots and unusual camera angles to make the viewers "get into" the taste of this cinematic experience. However, he is unable to truly develop a coherent plot which will complete the impression. "Arrebato" reminds of Antonioni's "Blow-Up" insofar that it is nominally an investigative story about someone uncovering a mystery, but it then slowly disintegrates into an abstract art-film which just dwells on art itself. There are several unusual moments (Jose argues with Ana and spills heroin on the ground in the apartment, but then takes a straw and snorts its dust from the carpet; a film reel of a man's penis getting an erection; film reel of a fast-forward time lapse of clouds and shadows "growing" on the ground during the day), and the main actor Eusebio Poncela is effective as the troubled film director, but "Arrebato" becomes too self-referential, to such an extent that it falls into autism, which is why the ending is a welcome conclusion to all this mess. There is a suspensful little moment where Jose watches TV, spots Pedro's reflection on the screen, and as Pedro is standing behind him with a doll, the TV program suddenly starts going in fast-forward. Afterwards, this all returns back to normal. The movie somehow missed an opportunity to take on a horror direction in that scene, because it would have been more interesting than the result we got.
Grade:++
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