[VIFF 2020] REVIEW: ‘Tales of the Lockdown’ won’t outlast the pandemic
Sara Sálamo appears in one of five short stories in Tales of the Lockdown.
Six months ago, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media flooded with images of quarantine activities around the world. Some people built homemade obstacle courses, others baked bread, and health authorities came up with some...creative suggestions for romance.
In a time when people couldn’t be together - they really shouldn’t be together now, either - there was a drive to connect digitally and prove that life barrels on. Maybe it’s that drive that inspired Tales of the Lockdown - a collection of five short films from Spain that each depict a different corner of pandemic life. We check in with some rather eccentric involuntary recluses: a serial killer in need of feng shui, an assassin-in-training, and a property manager with a dead body on his hands. Each short has only about 20 minutes to set the scene, dig into the drama and whisk us to the next story.
Some credit has to be given to the filmmakers for the constraints they worked under: tight spaces, entry-level equipment, stringent health and safety protocols. But most of the stories still feel overly rushed, with unconvincing characters and scenarios that don’t rise beyond what’s been posted on platforms like TikTok or Twitter during this time. Collating the shorts into a single volume also doesn’t convey much added meaning; the thesis appears to be that the pandemic is weird and unprecedented. We don’t really need a reminder.
The first short, “Emparedados” brings us to the apartment of a serial killer named Alberto (Rafa Castejón), who recently returned from prison. It’s the short with the most relevance to the pandemic: there’s mentions of sanitizing hands and applauding for health care workers in the evening. A neighbour named Maca (Manuela Velasco), unaware of Alberto’s past, feels the potential for a romantic connection and knocks on his door. They’re barely through with lunch when Alberto’s murders are revealed. But in a darkly comedic twist that continues through the other stories, Maca decides that Alberto would be a great customer for her business: purging negative spiritual energies through feng shui. Maybe the economy will recover sooner than we thought.
Luis Tosar and María Luisa Mayol in the short “Gourmet”.
The apprentice hitman story and another about an up-and-coming actress (Sara Sálamo) recording an audition tape are fun-enough diversions. But an episode about a pair of roommates who slowly discover their feelings for each other starts out well, only to speed through its ending at a breakneck pace, leading to some unnecessarily stilted dialogue. Within 3-4 minutes, Susana (Clara Méndez-Leite) goes from being ready to move to Finland to planning to start a family in Madrid. The pandemic isn’t going anywhere anytime soon - what’s the hurry?
The final short, “Gourmet” suffers from a similar fate: it has a solid setup, introducing us to Suso (Luis Tosar), an ambitious Macbeth-like landlord and his wife (María Luisa Mayol), who are under investigation by the police. A tenant in one of Suso’s buildings organized a rent strike and has gone missing, and several quick flashbacks show us Suso knows a lot more than he’s letting on. Then the final few shots give us a gruesome gut-punch of information (think Silence of the Lambs) and leave us hanging. But once the initial shock wears off, you start to scratch your head: why would the characters leap to such an extreme solution? Is it really the best way to handle their predicament, even during a lockdown?
If you’re looking for more “produced” bits of fiction made during the quarantine - content that’s a little more complex than selfie-style video clips - then Tales of the Lockdown could scratch that itch. But with some truly hilarious material hitting TikTok every second (not to mention full feature films and shows getting released), this anthology doesn’t distinguish itself enough.
Tales of the Lockdown gets two stars out of four.
