The first reaction upon seeing The Messiah was to think that the audience of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, two authors who define contemporary Spanish audiovisuals, were not prepared to receive the dramatic grenade that was going to be thrown at them.
These creators had proven to be masters of emotion and dramatic scenes approached crudely but always in vehicles soaked in a sense of humor like Veneno and Paquita Salas. A sense of humor, by the way, that perfectly read the entertainment industry, popular culture and also an imaginary until now linked to trash (always associated with the Spanish context) and also the essence of the meme, of virality and that. that can spread like wildfire from mobile to mobile.
But, paradoxically, despite promoting themselves with the crappy videos of a female Catholic pop band (reminiscent, of course, of the Flos Mariae), with their new creation they move away from this merciful view towards the viewer, that idea that The spectator must be offered an escape route in the form of a joke before and after touching his soul or causing him to cry.
The Messiah is a story about a failed person, the perversion of faith, toxic motherhood and the ability of adult beings to carry childhood traumas. About the ties that unite families, even when it is for the worse, after a childhood marked by psychological abuse and social isolation.
The story is told from two time planes. In the present, you can see how Irene (Macarena García) and Enric (Roger Casamajor), who were not educated in their childhood and had to flee from a mother who claimed to speak with God, react to the appearance of a viral phenomenon: the Stella Maris, the sisters they left behind and who upload Catholic music videos to save the world.
In the past, you can see her childhood (with Bruno Nuñez and Carla Moral in the roles) and her adolescence (with Biel Rossell and Irene Balmes) while the story of transformation and manipulation of Montserrat, the mother played by Ana Rujas, is told. Lola Dueñas and Carmen Machi in the different stages. Her unstable character becomes explosive when she comes into contact with a man with a crucifix on his neck and a reserved attitude (Albert Pla) who believes he has seen the light in her.
The work of Calvo and Ambrossi, in charge of both the script and the direction, is a work that one cannot finish both because of the layers that it progressively reveals and their nonconformity when it comes to settling on a tone and the nuances that acquires its address. They let the stages breathe with that light that offers a convenient improvisation from time to time. When the era or geographical environment changes, not only does the costume change but also the image.
They allow themselves to be captivated by Montserrat, by the farmhouses and by the everyday life of the locations and allow this to be compatible with numerous licenses: a poetic-musical montage that could sink the work and instead exalts it, they formally embrace the reputation of Montserrat as a whereabouts of UFOs, they delve into the anguish of a narcotic rave or into the eighties chills where the protagonist’s children look like Hansel and Gretel in the house made of candy.
This narrative versatility is also expressed in the three stages of the work, which goes from the drama of manners to family terror to say goodbye with two final chapters that are disconcerting because they move in the opposite direction from what was expected. Instead of resulting in a disjointed work, it offers the same as the interpretations of Rujas, Dueñas and Machi: a cohesion that integrates change into the work because it exposes change as a constant of the human experience.
Each shot and each line of dialogue is calculated to the millimeter with an organic result that offers a well-managed creative process, referring to it without giving up its own identity, letting itself be carried away by the construction of the characters. Its outcome should be talked about almost as much as the interpretive level. When you have such a choral production without a single weak link, where each actor knows how to extract gold from the lines that are written to them, you are faced with two geniuses of directing actors.
