DECORADO Review: Everything Is Strange Here
Alberto Vázquez expands his short film into a transcendent dark comedy for adults.
Something is rotten in the city of Anywhere.
Decorado
The film opens today, only in movie theaters, via GKids Films. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.
Among humans, we might call what Arnold experiences as a midlife crisis. Except: He's a mouse.
Living in a working-class neighborhood, Arnold is riding a stationary bicycle with great fury. Except: He has no bicycle.
Long unemployed, Arnold mopes around his apartment and ambles through his neighborhood with maximum frustration and minimum enjoyment, which has been sucked out of him by his dwindling prospects. Clearly, he is suffering from unspoken depression, and not the temporary 'boo hoo I'm having the blues' that we all have, but the deeper, despairing state of mind that impairs the ability to think clearly and act appropriately.
The city where Arnold and his long-suffering wife Maria live is permeated by a corporate being that is a behemoth: ALMA, an acronym for Almighty Limitless Megacorporation Agency, which is as forbidding as it sounds. Complicating its meaning is that "alma" is the Spanish word for "soul," which is what the all-powerful, always-advertising, alarmingly sucky corporation pretends to have.
Mired in depression, Arnold clings to one idea that he can't get anyone else to listen to or pretend to believe or to consider as possible: We are living in The Matrix. Or, in Arnold's version: We are living in The Set ("decorado" is the Spanish equivalent), a background for performances that are scripted.
In other words: It's destiny, baby, and I feel so bad.
Born in Spain, director Alberto Vázquez began as a comic book writer and illustrator, and then made a trio of short films before making his feature-film debut with the hand-drawn Psychonauts, The Forgotten Children -- co-written and co-directed by Pedro Rivero -- which our own Andrew Mack reviewed out of Fantasia in 2016: "It is a magnificent achievement in animation to have something that looks so raw around edges convey so much emotion, wonder and terror."
The film was based on Vázquez's graphic novel and short film Birdman. For his next feature-length project, Vázquez wrote and directed Unicorn Wars, which our own Ard Vijn reviewed out of the Kaboom Animation Festival in 2023: "Alberto Vázquez has stated in interviews that he had three major influences he followed while imagining the film: Bambi, Apocalypse Now and the bible. Amazingly, he has managed to mix them into a great film, far exceeding the cute-versus-gory jokes I was expecting."
Vázquez returns to his same-titled short film, released in 2016, for further inspiration. Like Unicorn Wars, the ideas have been germinating in his mind for years, and in Decorado, it feels like the ideas explode, rather than simply blossom.
Arnold is in dire straits. He loves his wife Maria, yet he feels that he is stretching the boundaries of their love with his extended period of frustrated desperation. Maria is exhausted, having to work long hours to keep the family (barely) afloat, while also needing to care for household duties, since Arnold is too depressed to do anything meaningful to help.
Each of them finds solace with others. For Arnold, it is his dear friend Ramiro, who lives outside the city, in a ramshackle cabin in a nearby forest, where he encourages Arnold to move, to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. For Maria, it is a fairy who arrives to flit about and torment her with stinging personal criticism; no wonder the fairy says her name is Depression.
When someone close to Arnold dies, it is as though his midlife crisis has blown up his life entirely. The doubling of the crisis leads to further crisis, for both Arnold and Maria, that bends the realm of their collective experience.
I don't want to say it gets philosophical, exactly, but it pushes past the strict confines of narrative storytelling and becomes a reflection upon life itself, and questioning the idea that our lives are controlled by destiny. After all, if we're all living on a set, who placed us here, and why?
Watch out for that opening curtain; it's not there without purpose.
Alberto Vázquez has created another distinctive and haunting experience that burns its way steadily into the subconscious and burrows its way deep under the skin.
