‘Anhell69’: Venice Review

Dir: Theo Montoya. Colombia/Romania/France/Germany. 2022. 75 mins.

A dark and disquieting meditation on a nation, and a generation, as seen through the eyes of a group of Medellin twentysomethings, Colombian Theo Montoya’s feature debut Anhell69 is, by its own definition, a trans film — one that does feature trans characters, but which also seeks to transgress filmic barriers. Part documentary, part celebration of outsider lives, and part remembrance, it’s a defiantly hybrid piece that’s cunning, challenging and sometimes confusing, seemingly conceived to play out on the border between life and death itself.

Both in its editing and visually, Anhell69 is often striking

This all sounds depressingly artsy and overblown. But two factors redeem Anhell69 and make it memorable, if upsetting. One is that it is rooted in, and derives from, tragic personal experience: of the eight names featured in the In Memoriam credits at the end, two are cast members. The other is that Montoya has a sure and careful grasp on his diffuse materials. These qualities should see it find an afterlife on the Spanish-speaking arthouse circuit following its initial outing in Critics’ Week in Venice.

Anhell69 opens with a hearse being driven down a deserted highway, accompanied by voice-over delivered by the corpse itself, its flat, downbeat delivery largely setting the mood for the film as a whole. The corpse, which seems to be the director’s, tells us his life story, interspersed with news footage of defining events in recent Colombian history — the end of the guerrilla war, the death of Pablo Escobar. In a country of such violence, the narrator asks, what future lies in store?

Following his excommunication at the age of fourteen, for masturbating whilst thinking of Jesus Christ, the dead narrator recalls that he took to smoking marijuana and watching films all day. He decides to make a film himself and invites his friends to an audition, questioning these engaging but strangely non-verbal people as they recount their lives — which, as a portrait of a generation, comes over as pretty depressing. In answer to the simple query “What do you do?” one interviewee replies that he “scrounges around for money”. But there is a commitment too: to self-reinvention, and to the pleasures of sex, to drag, and to drugs.

One of the interviewees is Camilo Najar, who was in Montoya’s short Son Of Sodom, which played in Cannes 2022. Appropriately and tragically, Najar is known by his Instagram handle ANHELL69. (‘ANHELL’ is a bastardisation of ‘Angel’, and Najar died of a heroin overdose shortly after the casting.) Our corpse/narrator explains that his social networks have become a cemetery.

The film within a film that Montoya plans to make is a vampire picture, partly dramatised here, about a country in which there is no room in the cemeteries for all the dead, so they are obliged to coexist with the living. This is the dark universe that Anhell69 renders so well. ‘Spectrophiles’ is the name given to those who are in love with the ghosts, and it’s pretty clear that Montoya himself would qualify as one: Anhell69 is a homage not only to Najar, but also to the drag artist Sharlott Zadoma, another interviewee who died after the audition.

Smartly, the driver of the hearse is played by the Colombian director Victor Gaviria: there is a direct nod to his best-known film, 1998 Cannes player The Rose Seller. It’s a film for which Montoya feels a special affinity because it’s cinema made, like Anhell69, for those who have been left out. (Many of the protagonists of The Rose Seller were also killed on the streets.)

One thing that all Montoya’s interviewees seem to agree on is that Medellin offers them no future: it’s best to live in the present. Montoya and his friends have indeed been abandoned by the state, but the film doesn’t explore why that might be. This is impressionistic fare, suggesting that the state’s legacy amongst its young is an obsession with death itself. Anhell69 makes its points through an otherworldly, pulsating electronic score and potent, spectral imagery rather than through exposition.

Both in its editing and visually, Anhell69 is often striking — in its fragmented, strobed renditions of drag nightclubs, in the ghostly sequences from the film Montoya is going to make, in its magnificent high-altitude drone shots of Medellin at night. But its best shot is left till last, as the camera withdraws from the cemetery grounds where the friends are huddled together, a striking tableau of a group of young people who have found themselves too soon to be living among the dead.