Wild Tales — patience has its limits
Six darkly funny stories about people losing their patience, and then much more. Sharp timing makes the revenge feel horribly satisfying.
Six darkly funny stories about people losing their patience, and then much more. Sharp timing makes the revenge feel horribly satisfying.
Spoiler-free review.
Wild Tales understands the appeal of imagining what you would say or do if you stopped being reasonable. Across six stories, people reach that point and keep going. The pleasure is in watching an ordinary frustration become something wildly disproportionate.
Damián Szifron is very good at escalation. He establishes a grievance quickly, lets you recognise it, then keeps testing how far your sympathy will travel. The situations become outrageous, but the irritation underneath them is often familiar enough to make the excess satisfying.
The comic timing is the best part for me. A pause, a stubborn response, or someone refusing to let a small thing go can turn the direction of a scene. The dialogue has bite without every exchange needing a punchline. People are usually quite serious about themselves, which makes them funnier.
As with most anthologies, I found some stories stronger than others. A few land their point early and stretch it, while others keep finding a new way to become more absurd. The shared mood gives the film enough consistency that the changes in characters rarely feel like starting over.
8/10. Wild, darkly funny, and satisfying in a way that is not always comfortable to admit. It gets a lot of comedy out of people who absolutely refuse to calm down.
Directed by Damián Szifron · 2014 · Spanish. Film details · Poster source. Artwork © its respective rights holders.
Six darkly funny stories about people losing their patience, and then much more. Sharp timing makes the revenge feel horribly satisfying.
— Desly