HAnnimal Lector

A man walks into a room. He's wearing a suit and tie and a wool overcoat. He walks over to a stool in the middle of the frame and sits down on it. In front of the stool is a small desk or a plinth covered in a grey, woollen cloth upon which is situated a giant tome of a book – it must be at least a thousand pages long. The man undoes the buttons on his coat and settles himself down. He opens the book and finds a page somewhere near the beginning, probably about fifty or so pages in. He takes a minute to find the best 'thinker' pose that his ego will allow him to present and apparently begins reading. The wall behind him is bare and white and there is a light switch over on the left hand side. There is the noise of passing traffic and the chirping of birds from outside but the man says nothing. The man thinks he's smart. He's not. He just thinks he is.

After ten minutes the scene cuts and the stool is empty again. Immediately the man re-enters the frame and sits down to once more begin reading. He doesn't need to open his coat this time – he's already done that. After apparently reading for a short while he nonchalantly flicks back through a few pages until he again settles on a page to go on with.

Twenty minutes in and the scene cuts back to an empty stool. The man immediately re-enters the frame, sits down, and apparently begins reading again. After another couple of minutes he casually flips back a few pages and continues. Sometimes he leans on his elbow, sometimes he puts both hands on the plinth and looks like he's ready to deliver a sermon. At distant points a motorcycle and a plane pass by outside.

After thirty minutes the scene cuts to an empty stool....

…. and you get the idea.

Jorge Villacorta doesn't seem to though, as he drags this utter drudgery out for another twenty minutes, expecting us to marvel at the audacity and cleverness of his turgid little film. At certain points you can distinctly see how pleased Jorge is with himself as wry smirks ripple across his face and he alternately raises what he wrongly believes to be an enigmatic eyebrow or two. After fifty minutes are up Jorge re-enters the frame, from a different angle this time, quickly flicks back another few pages and then promptly leaves. The End.

Writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, musician, talent co-ordinator, costumier, hair and make-up department head, concept artist, art director, special effects artist, visual effects lead, stunt co-ordinator and stunt performer, location manager and transportation captain, Jorge Luis Villacorta Santamato wants to tell you that his film (and by actually crediting himself with all of these titles it is very much His film) is a crime, fantasy, horror, mystery. It's not. If you're interested you can link from the film's IMDb page to Jorge's own review of his own film where he argues his case in suitably confounding language that it's all about objectivism and abstraction. Well, d'uh!

In his own review of his own film Jorge talks about the 'much lesser people' (in relation to capitalist society) while at the same time using words like 'peer', 'blessed' and 'accomplished scholar' to describe himself. He states that calling his film 'a movie about cannibalism is logical' and even proudly calls it an 'extremely perverse Peruvian snuff feature' where perverse is the only word which accurately describes anything which is going on, though probably not in the way Jorge thinks.

Jorge would probably say that I don't understand his film, or that I haven't taken the time to properly investigate what he is trying to say – and he would be right – I don't, I haven't. I don't care to. His film is literally just him in a bare room sitting down pretending to read a book for fifty minutes in a static frame. It's junk. I'm all for film being art but this is neither; it's just an extended navel gazing exercise which goes nowhere.

I've watched fifty minutes of this stuff so that you don't have to – so please don't – objectively.