Transgressive shock film lacks necessary balance and nuance
Note: this review contains references to the film’s extreme rape/trauma scenes.
Trauma is the newest release from Artsploitation Films, and the transgressive piece of shock cinema is as bleak and nihilistic as they come. If that interests you, then read on. The film hearkens from Chile and begins with a flashback to 1978 with a country under the thumb of dictator Augusto Pinochet. In an opening that feels like it was cribbed from the ending to A Serbian Film, you see the genesis of our antagonist as a young boy is drugged and forced to have nonconsentual sex with his dying mother for the enjoyment of onlooking soldiers. Beaten within an inch of her life, they make sure that before he finishes, they finish her; and then we then cut to a salacious lesbian love scene.
The setup from there is by the numbers as a group of four beautiful girls get lost looking for their cabin where they plan to have a weekend getaway. They stop off at a seedy bar for directions, where they are ogled by the backwoods locals. While the women party that night and you get some kind of weird development of a love triangle forming between three girls, two men from the bar show up, and it gets rapey as you would expect. To be specific, it’s the boy from the beginning, who is now a man, Juan (Daniel Antivilo), and his son Mario (Felipe Rios). The film then attempts to make this about the cycle of trauma and how it repeats itself, hence the name. The film does do something interesting with this trope, and it’s something that I’ve seen as a trend in transgressive cinema recently, in that women aren’t the only victims here. Juan rapes not only women, but his own son, and while this doesn’t earn the film a pass, it’s an interesting evolution of the device in the current political climate.
After the rape the women do what you would do and call the cops, who send for backup and are quickly killed off by Juan and Mario. The women of course then decide to take matters into their own hands when Juan abducts a young village girl. At this point the film kind of runs off the rails, because after all the abuse the women have endured, they decide to go into Juan’s compound where you’re treated to a scene where a person is blown up thanks to a stick of dynamite put up their ass. The film also keeps trying to illicit some kind of sympathy or justification for Juan’s actions by flashing back to what created this monster, as we see him abused as a child by the previous political regime. It’s something that fails miserably since the time would be better served fleshing out the characters of the four women, who are tasked with taking Juan out. It’s ultimately an uneven film that never outdoes the opening moments and spends the entire runtime trying to reach those super bleak lows.
While fans of extreme cinema might dig Trauma, it’s not as nuanced or complex as some of the other offerings out there. Its attempt to show some reasoning behind the monster, even if it’s to illustrate some political agenda, is ultimately the film’s undoing. A straight rape/revenge thriller would have benefited from a bit more character development rather than trying to get in the head of this monster or to justify his actions. It also doesn’t help that the film begins with a bizarre tonal shift where this super extreme snuff-esque opening is followed by a titillating lesbian sex scene between two protagonists. It genuinely makes you wonder what the filmmaker is trying to accomplish here, and if the film really has something to say or is it just trying to shock you. Extreme and transgressive cinema fans will find the film worth a watch, but it lacks the subtext of films like In A Glass Cage or A Serbian Film.