Why is death and violence so fascinating? Is it morally correct to show violence in movies? If so, is there a limit to what we should show? That’s the subject of Ángela’s examination paper. She is a young student at a film school in Madrid. Together with the student Chema (who is totally obsessed with violent movies) they find a snuff movie in which a young girl is tortured and killed. Soon they discover that the girl was a former student at their school… –IMDb
Raised in Spain after his Chile-based parents fled the country shortly before the 1973 right-wing coup d’état, Amenábar decided to be a filmmaker early on, heading to Madrid’s Complutense University to study cinema. Undeterred after his professors flunked him, Amenábar learned the craft firsthand on low-budget productions. Backed by a producer and star he met during his “apprenticeship,” Amenábar burst onto the Spanish film scene at the ripe old age of 23 as writer/director and composer with his first feature, Tesis (1996). A moody mystery involving a cinema graduate student and snuff films, Tesis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and earned several Spanish Academy Awards. Amenábar then scored an even bigger hit with his next film, Open Your Eyes (1997). A complex psychological thriller about a womanizing egotist who is disfigured in an accident, Open Your Eyes became a blockbuster in Spain, bringing Amenábar his first international distribution and a Sundance Film Festival berth… read more
if you're watching it for the very first time you need to remember that this was a very low budget movie made in Spain in 1996... I'm pointing this out because I had very high expectations. :::S P O I L E R A L E R T ::: for me the second hour of the film was just unbearable, cheesy and boring... I was counting the minutes for it to end.
***1/2 Very good effort for a first film. A sensitive subject, three excellent actors and some great scenes that already announced the coming of a new auteur among us. The encounter between Angela and Chema at the cafeteria while both characters are listening to their walkmen (Hard Rock for Chema and classical music for Angela) is a perfect example of the way cinema may manipulate an audience. Recommended.
While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl which was a former student in her faculty is tortured to death. The violence is more implicit than explicit in this wonderfully directed low budget film, and shows the potential of the director that brought us "Open your eyes", "The others" and "the sea inside"...
La vi por primera vez antes de entrar en la facultad dónde se rodó... y me encantó. Te engancha desde el primer minuto por el halo de misterio que rodea a la trama. Sus personajes, que parecen que todos tienen algo que ocultar, son una de las bazas de la primera película como director de Alejandro Amenábar. Por cierto, su nombre aparece en una de las bases de datos de la película.
“Tesis” posiblemente no sea la mejor pelicula de Amenábar, pero si la mas recordada dentro de su obra y, si nos ponemos a pensar que se trata de una ópera prima, nos podemos dar cuenta de que este… read review
