“Disappear Completely” may suffer from diminishing returns, but there’s an ironic pleasure in a movie about a cursed man losing his five senses one at a time that gets gradually worse as you watch it.
Caught somewhere between Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler” and Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell,” director Luis Javier Henain’s Spanish-language horror won the attention of genre fans out of Fantastic Fest 2022 but just started streaming in the U.S. on Netflix Friday, April 12. The supernatural tale of intensifying torture recounts the fate of Santiago (the unflappable Harold Torres), a tabloid photographer whose primary job seems to be hunting down crime scenes so he can snag candid shots of corpses.
We meet our nauseating anti-hero at the scene of a picturesque accident; crushed by a light pole, a young woman in yellow bleeds beautifully. She’s evocative of Evelyn McHale (look it up!) and the photographer is quick to snap a front-page spread. It’s not until the local rag Santiago works for decides to edit the photographs that he takes explicit objection with the obviously immoral practice. When he’s summoned to the home of a local senator whose half-clothed body has been ravaged by rats, Santiago gets more than he bargained for as sensational pictures give way to an unimaginable revenge plot.
Co-written by Henain and Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes, “Disappear Completely” (AKA “Desaparecer Por Completo”) follows a formula that’s hardly overdone but manifests in tropes that will likely be recognizable to fans familiar with the genre’s typical approach to portraying dark magic. The script fails to find much to offer by way of compelling character development; Santiago’s girlfriend Marcel (Tete Espinoza) and ill-fated dog Zombie are perfectly interesting, just nothing to write home about. But what this twisted portrait of crumbling personhood lacks in earnest emotions it more than makes up for with a body horror that’s frequently subtle in execution but always brutal in conceit.
As Santiago begins to lose his senses…first smell, then taste, then touch, and so on… our terrified protagonist scrambles to understand who has cursed him and why. He’ll have only a handful of attempts to stop the progression of this malevolent degenerative disease as an unseen clock ticks beneath every scene and threatens to turn a man fighting for his life into a vegetable before our eyes.
The filmmakers overplay their hand at times, distorting audio and visual elements to mimic Santiago’s decline but muddling some of the good work their actors have done in the process. Torres holds on particularly tight toward the end of the movie, doing his best to keep his performance from veering too far toward funny as the physical demands of his role ramp up and his dialogue falls to zero. Henain and Aguado-Fentanes could have helped their actor out by writing a more specific finale to what’s ultimately a better story in theory. Still, its skin-crawling presentation (you will feel, smell, and even taste a few scenes) and uniquely perverse consideration of a terrifying concept make it worth seeing.
You’ll want “Disappear Completely” to give you anything when it gives you quite literally nothing in the end. But with some memorably grisly moments and a star that’s committed to acting past his character’s spectacularly fucked fate, there’s plenty to enjoy while it lasts.
Grade: B-
“Disappear Completely” is now streaming on Netflix.
