La Morte Rouge (2006)
I'll be honest with you: I went into La Morte Rouge fully expecting to be floored. Víctor Erice is a legendary name, this short sits on the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" list of the top 1000 films of the 21st century, and I was primed for something transcendent. What I actually got left me genuinely baffled, and not in a good way.
Let me be clear about what this thing actually is before I say anything else. It is, for the most part, a slideshow. Static photographs of locations, stitched together with transitions that would look at home in a PowerPoint presentation from 2003, accompanied by a voiceover narration. That is the film. And when you go in expecting visual poetry from the man behind The Spirit of the Beehive, that is quite the gut punch.
Here is the maddening part though: the words are genuinely beautiful. Strip away the visual component entirely, close your eyes and just listen, and there is something real and moving here. Erice is reflecting on memory, on cinema, on the way the past clings to us, and the narration carries a melancholic weight that I found genuinely touching. His love for the medium is absolutely palpable. You can hear it in every sentence. As someone who responds strongly to emotive, well-crafted writing, I was not immune to it. There were moments where the prose genuinely got to me.
But a film cannot live on its script alone, and the visual execution here is, I'm sorry to say, bafflingly amateurish. The photographs feel inert rather than evocative. The transitions are clunky and jarring. There is no rhythm to the editing, no sense that the images and the words are working in genuine conversation with each other. It feels less like a considered piece of filmmaking and more like a rough cut that never made it to the finishing line. I kept waiting for it to open up, to give me something to look at, and it never did.
I have a lot of patience for slow, meditative, formally unconventional work. I sat with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and found it mesmerising precisely because, even at its most oblique, it had a genuine visual intelligence and a coherent formal logic. La Morte Rouge does not offer me that. The form feels like a limitation that was never properly interrogated or transcended, just accepted and ploughed through.
What I am left with is a deeply personal project that clearly means an enormous amount to Erice, and I respect that sincerity completely. The emotional core is real. But sincerity and personal significance are not, on their own, enough to make something work as a film. The craft has to carry its share of the load, and here it simply does not.
I genuinely cannot explain its place on that prestigious list. Maybe there is a version of this where you surrender entirely to the narration and let the images fall away, and the experience becomes something more purely meditative. Maybe if you come to it with a deeper personal investment in Erice's relationship with cinema history, the emotional geography makes more sense. I came in good faith and I still found myself at arm's length for most of its runtime.
Two stars. Saved from one by a script that deserved a better vehicle.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2006 | Watched: 2026-07-09
