There is a specific kind of movie that does not care whether you are comfortable, and Against Nature is absolutely one of them. The debut feature from Mexican writer-director Axel Bertha world premieres July 9 in the Proxima competition at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and the trailer alone is enough to make you want to sit in a dark room and think for a while.
The film follows Jonás, a silent and deeply mysterious man who returns to the countryside after years away to work as a stonemason. That is roughly as much plot as the movie seems interested in offering you. Bertha drew from a real police report about a murder he found in a local Mexican newspaper, using that kernel of documented violence as a launching point for something far less literal. Jonás eventually gets pulled into something primal, hurtling toward what the film describes as a stark unraveling that humanity, since its origins, has not been able to escape. It is that kind of movie.
What makes this feel like a genuine event rather than just a festival entry is the pedigree behind it. The film was co-produced by Carlos Reygadas, the director of Silent Light and Post Tenebras Lux, who has spent his career making films where spiritual journeys and expressionistic cinematography do the heavy lifting that dialogue usually would. His fingerprints on a debut like this tell you a lot about what Bertha is going for. If you have never seen Silent Light, now is the time to fix that before Against Nature gets a wider release.
The production itself sounds like a feat of commitment. Bertha lived in the actual location where the real incident happened for six months before filming began. He shot on 35mm with a very limited amount of film, under difficult weather conditions, with a cast of entirely local non-actors. The cinematography is split between Flavia Martínez and Edson Reyes, and the score comes from Colombian electronic musician Ela Minus alongside composer Ariel Guzik. Ela Minus makes analog-only electronic music with a punk backbone, and if you know her work at all, you know that pairing her sound with this kind of raw, landscape-driven filmmaking is a genuinely interesting choice.
The trailer mentions hatred for the world, alienation, and something called "that black sphere." It is not exactly selling you a fun Friday night. But if you are the kind of person who thinks about what movies can do beyond telling a story, Against Nature looks like it is asking questions worth sitting with.
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