Directed and co-written by Rodrigo Bellott, Blood-Red Ox is a trippy horror that felt like it was rarely playing fair with the viewer, with seemingly each and every scene open to interpretation. It is also the first Bolivian horror film that I have reviewed on this blog (to the best of my knowledge). I tried my best to follow the twisting narrative of the movie, but at some point I gave up, and just sat back to bask in the inscrutable scenes and images I was presented with, a feeling of being a bit too dense to really understand what was going on. One thing I can say, fun fact, every single character's name in this film begins with an 'A', also, this is said to have been stylied on the films of Polanski, Bergman and Argento from the 70's and 80's.
Amir (Mazin Akar) and his boyfriend Amat (Kaolin Bass) have travelled to Bolivia to visit an old friend of Amir's, Amancaya (Andrea Camponovo), an activist working on a regeneration project in the South American rainforest. It isn't long however before Amat begins to have terrifying nightmares about the titular blood-red ox. Amir is determined to help his boyfriend's increasingly unhinged state, but then he too begins to suffer the same troubling dreams.
For roughly the first half of this I felt like I had a good handle on what was going on. The feeling of horror remained simmering in the background, mostly appearing as nightmare sequences, with the story preoccupied with the couples trip. Past this first half however things begin to literally fall apart. After one pretty crazy nightmare sequence the character doesn't seem to ever fully awaken, with the film's narrative becoming increasingly surreal and obtuse, something that doesn't let up all the way to the end. There was twist after twist thrown at the viewer that makes you question everything that has gone on before. Throughout there was repeated instances of duality as metaphors (I assume) for what was happening. There were scenes that play out exactly the same to each other but featuring different sets of characters, there are repeated lines of identical dialogue that are said by the same character in completely different locations, and there was a short nature talk that discusses a special type of seed from which two different trees grow and entwine with each other that felt relevant to the themes.
