FILMS
FILMS
Mesmerising period drama, the perils of narcissism and a deranged comedy with “killer style”
Passionate and powerful: Luca Marinelli and Denise Sardisco in Martin Eden
WHITE ON WHITE Not many performers in today’s cinema can approach the mesmerising strangeness of Klaus Kinski in his prime, but Alfredo Castro is one of them. The Chilean actor made his international breakthrough as the lead in two films by Pablo Larrain – playing a disco-dancing sociopath in 2008’s Tony Manero and a morgue worker caught up in the horrors of the Pinochet years in Post Mortem (2010). More recently, his supporting role as a celebrity detective in Argentinian film Rojo proved that Castro is one of those actors who can just quietly stroll into a film midway and set your nerves tingling with a sense of irreducible danger.
Castro is in muted mode, but no less galvanising, in White On White –a period drama by Chilean-Spanish director Théo Court. He plays Pedro, a photographer who visits an estate in a remote snowbound stretch of Tierra Del Fuego on the cusp of the 20th century. He has been commissioned by a powerful absent landowner named Mr Porter to photograph his pre-teen bride-to-be Sara (Esther Vega). But when Pedro’s interest in the girl breaks its agreed boundaries, he finds himself trapped in Porter’s desolate house, echoing with creaks, footsteps and the sound of drunken disorder, and forced to take part in his host’s terrible project – the systematic extermination of the local indigenous Selk’nam people.