Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Jose Luis Montesinos
Starring: Paula Del Rio, Miguel Angel Jenner, Jordi Aguilar
Who’s a good boy then? Who’s a good boy?! Not Athos, the breakout
character of Yako Blesa and José Luis Montesinos’ efficient
thriller Ropes, that’s for sure. Athos is an exceptionally handsome German Shepard, all
gleaming coat and immutable canine muscle. His pelt is the deep brown of
finest Lindt, with darker fur about his serious doggy head and ever alert
ears, just like a black mask. Athos is the support dog for what is left of
a beleaguered Spanish family: Elena, who is a young paraplegic in a
wheelchair, and her dad Miguel, who is a broken man on the sauce. Both are
in the fallout of a recent trauma, which is signposted in the opening
scenes by the loaded visual of a bunch of flowers tied to a busy freeway’s
buffer. Can the two forge a new life for themselves and put the past
behind them? Not in this dog-eat-dog world.
Father and daughter rock up at their new house; hollowly spacious to
accommodate Elena’s newly constrained circumstances, a big house isolated
from the rest of civilisation. The problem is that Athos only goes and
attacks a bat, who happens to be rabid (infected bats! Haven’t you -
allegedly - caused enough trouble this year?!). This triggers Athos to go
the full Cujo within minutes of the film’s lean and mean run time. Aww, he
was only trying to do his job, after all!
Sick as a dog now, protective Athos becomes a threat; man’s best friend
becomes, if not its worst enemy, then at least an urgent danger to a young
girl whose mobility is limited to basic hand movements (the ‘ropes’ of the
title obliquely refer to the cables tied to the door handles which Elena
would not otherwise be able to reach). To make matters worse, Miguel keels
over and goes into cardiac arrest just as Athos begins to play up, leaving
Elena alone with the fervent dog and her pet chinchilla - who is, frankly,
no help at all in this unfortunate sequence of events.
Disregarding Oscar orientated fare wherein disability is the defining
feature of both drama and character, horror gives disabled representation
a higher prominence than other films, a testament to horror’s ability to
feature topics and aspects of life which remain taboo to mainstream
genres: Franklin in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that kid in Friday the Thirteenth 2, Silver Bullet and, perhaps most poignantly, poor old Will
in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, are examples.
The film which Ropes cleaves most closely to, though, is
The Curse of Chucky (with a bit of
Gerald’s Game too, perhaps) - however, unlike that nastily
effective little film, the threat here is not a devious doll, but an
unwell animal who for the most part is a menace prowling about outside the
house, or who, in the event of Athos finally managing to sneak in, is just
about able to engage in what can only be described as low-speed wheelchair
chases. I will confess, due to the continued lack of tangible peril
regarding Elena, I was hoping against hope for a twist that revealed Athos
was simply trying to protect her all along, in his own confused but loyal
and rabid way...
Within this dramatic checkmate, the film introduces further horror
elements, such as the ghost-twin of Elena, and heart-breaking flashbacks
to the moments leading up to the accident, an event for which Elena may or
may not have been culpable. This is where Ropes more fully
realises its ambitions, as a horror film which explores the complexities
of grief and guilt. As novel a twist on the home invasion as it may be,
the pseudo-Cujo
aspects of Ropes are a bit of a dog’s dinner. However, in
its thought-provoking and emotive undertones, Ropes proves
that its bite is far more effective than its bark.
Ropes is on UK Digital from
November 19th.
