Reviews & Ratings for
Relatos salvajes (2014)

This is an Argentinian anthology film consisting of several stories. The one thing common to all these tales is the theme of Revenge. These stories range from the quirky, funny tales to full-on gory affairs. The entire set up of the movie is dipped in irony. The movie offers some interesting visuals like a plane crash see up close, long winding roads and a multi story building being detonated into rubble. Stories like Pasternak and Bombita are witty, clever, twisted and humour in its own way.

All the actors do a great job playing dark, twisted characters. The movie can be seen as a study of human behavior and how when even a very good man finally snaps, he ca turn into a dark conniving criminal. The movie sheds light on the animalistic instincts of man, a point conveyed through the opening credits where every name in the credit is substantiated by a particular animal. Relatos Salvajes serves the viewers poignant satire dipped in delicious black humour.

Wild Tales, produced by Pedro Almodóvar, saves anthology comedy film from future disaster. It's everything Movie 43 wasn't; while Movie 43 got a gratuitous number of directors to waste their talents on following the same type of humour, the movie I just saw is all done by one director, and some of the jokes are disgusting yet all six segments are funny in just the right ways. They have actual storytelling. They start off serious for more or less than a few minutes, but then a joke comes and each story becomes a romp, and it's some of the smartest comedic timing I've seen in a foreign film.

What makes these stories even better is that they are all original. They don't parody other works directly, they go for feels other than the whole thing's "black comedy" approach and they are never, ever predictable. Their environments are realistic and their humour is universal and never out-of-the-blue raunch. Oh, I'm a sucker for certain raunchy comedies, but I highly reccommend this movie if you want a break from stoner jokes; it's the finest anthology comedy since Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.