Critics reviews

While a little more social detail regarding the state of play for the gay community in wider Guatemalan society would be welcome, Bustamante maintains a strong emotional focus, letting events play out elliptically, while giving room for Olyslager to explore the conflict of his character.

To its very last moment, “Tremors” is a prodigiously gut-wrenching demand for change; the film isn’t kindly asking for tolerance but bluntly exposing the torment inflicted in the name of a prejudiced God.

The film’s “temblores” — Spanish for “tremors” — are emblematic of the script’s preference for allusion over depth. Occurring only twice, these earthquakes make for gorgeously cinematic moments, bringing the gray-blue settings to urgent life. But they’re deployed as too-simple metaphors for the characters’ interpersonal instability.

If anything, “Tremors” builds its surreal mood to a brilliant fault: the outside world is so effectively and oppressively shuttered out that the national political context in which Pablo’s individual tragedy plays out is rendered a little hazy... Still, hot protest is still present in its aggressively close-up character study...

Even in its stillest moments, “Tremors” shudders with the full weight of its spiritual uncertainty. While gripping enough throughout, it’s not a particularly flashy piece of work, or one that seeks to making any sweeping pronouncements about the lives of gay men in Guatemala City or anywhere else. It’s neither an emotional powerhouse, nor a visual wonder.

[I]t is a convincing, touching and, at certain points, infuriating depiction of what it means to be a gay man in a society dominated by a very traditional version of the Christian religion.

Through the bearded, muscular, alternately sharp-suited and stark-naked figure of Olyslager, Bustamante also explores ideas of masculinity, the male form and stereotypes of homosexuality, questioning, as Pablo’s family and Pablo himself do: what makes a man?

No major earthquake actually takes place... But these fleeting geological disturbances are more than sufficient to underline the idea that the bonds, relationships and social formations depicted on screen may be rather less solid than their respectable surfaces appear.

The tragedy of the film is the manner in which Pablo’s religion has become a prison. His decision to accept the church’s offer of a “cure” for his homosexuality transforms an involving personal story into a heartbreaker of a drama.