‘The Message’ review: Low-key black-and-white pleasure from Argentina’s Iván Fund

Dir. Iván Fund. Argentina/Spain/Uruguay 2025. 91mins

The younger heroine of Argentinian drama The Message will not be a horse whisperer, precisely – extra an empathetic gazer at, and seemingly a ‘channeler’ of all method of beasts. The newest characteristic from long-established director Iván Fund (The Lips, 2010; Nightfall Stone, 2021) is a quietly mesmerising journey that offers its sparse handful of narrative playing cards solely at its personal tempo. Leisurely in rhythm, and gorgeously however merely shot in black and white, The Message affords a gently off-kilter depiction of childhood and its relation to the non-human universe. This very achieved low-key pleasure seems to be set to attach with area of interest audiences lengthy after its Berlin Competitors debut.

The comedian components emerge of their very own accord 

Setting a attribute tone, the movie begins at evening, with the inhabitants of a camper van largely saved out of sight off-screen; all we may be positive of at first is a younger woman scrutinising a tortoise that has been delivered to her by its anxious proprietor. Then, as the car strikes by daylight throughout a rural panorama, we get to know the three central characters: a younger woman named Anika (Anika Bootz), and two aged folks, Myriam (Mara Bastelli), a lady with dangly earrings and a touch of bohemian glamour, and the rakish-looking, fedora-wearing, altogether taciturn Roger (Marcelo Subiotto).

A stop-off at a pet cemetery reveals the trio’s occupation: the adults promote Anika’s providers as an ‘Animal Communicator’, capable of fathom the ideas of pets, whether or not alive or lifeless, and to disclose their messages to their human house owners. Cats, horses, a canine racked by self-doubt, a really twitchy hedgehog apparently pining for its siblings – any fauna are Anika’s area, even a capybara, the outsize South American rodent encountered en route. 

The trio stay and sleep in cramped circumstances in the van, subsisting on petrol station snacks and corncobs gleaned in fields. For a lot of the movie, we’re left to take a position about the nature of their relationship. Are the two adults – whom Anika addresses by their first names – her grandparents? Are they working a rip-off on a gullible clientele, or do they imagine in the powers of this pre-pubescent Dr Doolittle? And shouldn’t the woman be at college, or is she on vacation – maybe the kind of prolonged existential trip that so usually appears to happen in artwork films about childhood?

Solutions start to fall into place when the travellers attain their meant vacation spot – a rural psychological hospital resembling a rundown vacation camp. However The Message is much less about answering questions, and extra about immersing us in the on a regular basis of these characters’ unusual existence. Regardless of the ostensibly weird subject material, the movie finds its good register by enjoying issues completely straight – letting the comedian components emerge of their very own accord together with the lyricism.

The vagueness round the characters and their backstories offers The Message one thing of the drifting really feel of different, equally languid South American fictions – we’re not that far in spirit from the early peripatetic movies of Lisandro Alonso (e.g. Liverpool), however with out the emphatic longueurs, or from one other laconic Argentinian highway film, Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias (2011). Fantastically shot by Gustavo Schiaffino, with the landscapes usually seen head-on or laterally by way of windshield or aspect home windows, as if from the characters’ distracted point-of-view, the movie is a drift by way of an ostensibly mundane panorama that sometimes reveals hanging options – like a river in an extended gorge – that change into a pure playground for Anika. 

Our questions on whether or not Anika is being exploited by her guardians are answered to a point by the efficiency of younger newcomer Bootz, whose joyous expressions and rapport with the adults counsel that she, and the character she performs, are having the time of their lives. Veterans Bestelli and Subiotto – who each appeared in Nightfall Stone – exude world-weary tenderness in their responses to her and the journey. All through, the movie has a successful melancholy appeal, enhanced by a spare rating from Mauro Morelos that includes plangent solo trumpet and occasional muted horn fanfares. There are bursts of pumping pop too – by, appropriately sufficient, the Pet Store Boys.