La casa lobo

In a picture-perfect valley of the Andes, a rural colony is home to German immigrants and their offspring. At first La Casa Lobo cleverly pretends to be an archival film singing the praises of “Colonia Dignidad”, but the film soon turns out to be a perverted and disturbing tale, feeding on familiar children’s stories – from Little Red Riding Hood to The Three Little Pigs – to better bring out the darkness of the events it relates. The house in question is the place where Maria takes refuge after she has escaped from the colony. The wolf is Paul Schaeffer, a former SS who has moved to Chile, a notorious paedophile, a zealous torturer working for Pinochet, and the head of the colony. In a space that is continuously transfigured by an animation technique perfected over many installations in art venues around the world, Cristóbal León and Joaqín Cociña give Maria’s story a nightmarish and universal quality. Movements and transformations that are typical of fairy tales become the rule that animates the image itself. The wolf is a pig. The piggies are children. And Maria is an object. In a luxuriant motion, interspersed by a few recurrent motifs like the door or the bed, roles switch and are reallocated all the time. Evil takes many forms and appears suddenly where you least expect it, based on a logic pertaining to dreams as much as to art therapy and its free association principle. This is where lies the genius of this profoundly expressionist film, onto which all viewers can project their own emotions. (CG)