Jonathan Romney 

Wakolda review – Nazis in Patagonia?

Lucía Puenzo's creepy follow-up to the elegant XXY fails to convince as either an arthouse film or thriller, writes Jonathan Romney
  
  

Wakolda, other films
'We're never quite persuaded of his charisma': Alex Brendemuhl in Wakolda. Photograph: PR

Argentinian director Lucía Puenzo made her name with the elegant, impressionistic drama XXY, but heads into uncomfortably baroque terrain with this uncertainly pitched drama set in an Alpine-looking region of Patagonia in 1960. A family arrives to take over an old hotel and are befriended by a German doctor (Àlex Brendemühl), who takes a disturbing scientific interest in their blond-haired 12-year-old daughter, Lilith (Florencia Bado). Hearty choruses of Deutschland über alles in the local school, mysterious neighbours with bandaged faces… Perhaps you can see where all this is going. Based on Puenzo's own factually inspired novel, Wakolda lies somewhere between a suspense thriller and a delicately atmospheric art film, but is properly effective as neither, not least because it's scuppered by soft gothic tweeness (Lilith's father designs dolls with mechanical beating hearts, if you please). Spanish actor Brendemühl once played an unforgettably mundane serial killer in Jaime Rosales's The Hours of the Day; here, he's required mainly to glower behind a clipped moustache, and we're never quite persuaded either of his character's charisma or of his malign intent.

 

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