Los Parecidos: It’s A Good Life

I’ve got kind of a soft spot for films that aren’t afraid to get weird, that aren’t afraid to create a feeling of wrongness, of things not working the way we expect them to. It’s less about what happens in the movie than how it happens. Modern horror films are often naturalistic to one degree or another, normal people in a normal setting, acted and shot in ways that don’t call attention to the artifice of film. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it in and of itself, but every now and then I like something that isn’t afraid to twist one or more of those elements into something that keeps the viewer off-balance. It’s a gamble, because sometimes the oddness ends up becoming distracting, but when it works it creates a sense of uneasiness that lays over everything else, a sense that all bets are off.

Los Parecidos (The Similars) is thoroughly, effectively weird.

It really begins with the opening title card and credits, which are formatted in a style more common to films of, say, the 1940s or 1950s than the modern day, and superimposed over an obviously artificial rainstorm in black and white. This transitions into a voice-over about a man named Martin, who we see working behind the ticket counter at a bus station. It goes on and on about how Martin thinks this storm is nothing unusual, and how wrong he is. It’s the kind of “he thinks everything fine, but he’s about to find out otherwise” narration you’d associate with television shows like The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery.

We are introduced, in short order, to our setting (a bus station in rural Mexico), and our cast of characters. There’s Martin the ticket agent, and Rosa, who works at the station with Martin. Then there’s Ulises, an employee of a nearby mine who’s trying to get back to Mexico City to see his wife, who has just gone into labor. There’s Irene, who is eight months pregnant herself, on the run from an abusive husband, and Alvaro, a student radical on his way to a conference, and Roberta and her son Ignacio, on their way to see a specialist who can treat Ignacio’s mysterious condition. Finally, there is Gertrudis, an indigenous woman who sits in the corner, mumbling to herself in a language nobody else understands. It seems to be the late 1960s, and it’s raining heavily outside.

At first, it seems like the biggest problem anyone has is that the rain has delayed the buses, and so everyone’s stuck in the bus station. But the news reports get stranger and stranger - it’s not just rain, but a hurricane. And it’s not just affecting Mexico, it’s a storm that is improbably engulfing the entire world. It is raining everywhere, all at once. The radio cuts in and out. There are warnings to not go out into the rain, and to avoid people who have been out in the rain. There are…transformations.

And then, among the eight people trapped in the bus station, the seizures begin.

To describe where all of this is headed would be a disservice, because a lot of this film’s strength is in its sheer what-the-fuckedness, which is as much down to how it’s all presented as what actually happens. It’s shot largely but not entirely in black and white, with obviously artificial effects throughout, on maybe four sets which comprise the bus station. There’s ominous music throughout, minor-key strings and woodwinds in a style reminiscent of the 1950s horror films it resembles This staginess, combined with acting and dialogue consistently pitched at the high end of melodramatic, makes it feel more like a teleplay than a film, an artifact of a different time when theater coexisted uneasily with television

The archaic presentation is in service of a story that goes to some very strange places. Everyone’s on edge, nobody knows what Gertrudis is saying as she casts stones and implores people in a language nobody speaks (and which isn’t subtitled), Ignacio keeps screaming about how the water is not normal water, and the seizures people experience bring on baffling physical changes. There are a lot of narrative feints at work - first you think it’s the unusual storm that is the problem, then it’s the mysterious seizures, and then it’s the transformations that result from the seizures. These eight people are trapped together while all of these bizarre things happen to them, so and from all of these unexplained events emerges the paranoia that grips any group of people thrown together in close quarters under difficult conditions. There's an undertone of political unrest and intrigue to everything as well. I'm sure I'm missing some specifics, but both Alvaro and Roberta are trying to get someplace that has a place in Mexico's history of civil unrest, and the tension between working stiff Ulises and student radical Alvaro percolates throughout. Nobody trusts anybody, everyone points the finger at everyone else. Slowly the truth reveals itself, and it’s bigger and more horrifying that anybody could have imagined. Once the other shoe drops, we realize how helpless everyone is. It’s all a game, and they’re just pieces, like dolls being moved around for a child’s amusement.

And this is how getting weird with it makes it so effective. The basic story is a solid one, and one that, if told in a more accessible fashion, could be perfectly entertaining. But by choosing to frame the whole thing as a late-60s period piece, and telling it using cinematic techniques that feel even a decade earlier than that, it feels like something out of time, a fever dream of a film glimpsed on a channel that shouldn’t even be broadcasting, on a television that isn’t even plugged in.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix