Critics reviews

Lucrecia Martel’s adaptation of fellow Argentinean Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel is one of those rare cinematic objects that seems to exist in only glancing relation to the world of movies that surrounds it. Nearly every composition surprises with asymmetries and odd placements of figures.

With her purposely disorienting mise en scène, Martel plunges us into this Beckettian limbo, a surreal satire of miscommunication between the putative ruling class and the natives.

These two films [Zama and A Ilha Dos Amores], apart from having communicating channels with each other, besides of their fully exemplifying the concept of mise en scène and of managing to convert sensation in form and vice versa, they also molecularly alter the cells of the organism and expand the perception while watching them.

The film becomes like Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God or like [Alex Garland's] Annihilation, as Zama and his men enter a landscape where they are disoriented and unwanted. Martel films it in jewel-like greens, in long shots that retain an essential mystery and alien beauty.

The result is a beguiling cinematic journey through identity formation in Latin America, where the legacy of colonialism and its discontents runs deep.

Martel has fashioned Zama into a fearless, piercing piece of work. The movie plays out like a dreamlike stream of indelicate curiosities. . . . Martel’s sensibility is as oblique as it is sensitive, confounding as it is grimly humorous. It’s a movie that seems constantly to be spilling the secrets of this world, but without fanfare—there’s an unsettling banality to it all.

In the history of film adaptation, Zama is an exceptional case. . . . Martel’s Zama offers a passionately informed and intuitive reading that is at once a reply and a carrying forward, a fusion that brings Di Benedetto’s novel into entirely new territory. Taken together, book and film bring new understanding to one another, and come to form a single work of art.

Martel’s film likewise willfully disorients—even more so [than in Di Benedetto's novel], as her adaptation forgoes any mention of the specific years (1790, 1794, 1799) that structure the source text. But paradoxically, this unmooring makes possible, as it does in Martel’s earlier movies, a more primal understanding of ugly truths and gruesome histories.

Ms. Martel’s attention to period detail is impeccable without being show-offish about it. But “Zama” is not the kind of period piece that aims for suspension of disbelief. Its signals its modernity in a variety of ways, particularly on the soundtrack.

Martel speaks of having entered not only the world of Antonio Di Benedetto’s remarkable 1956 novel, but also the inner processes of the Argentine author’s creative imagination. While following the basic outline of the book, she takes the usual liberties involved in page-to-screen adaptation. . . . But Martel has allowed herself a far greater margin of freedom in this genuine “re-imagining” of the novel.

These kinds of juxtapositions . . . function much like the doubled voice in the novel. Nothing if not dialectical, “Zama” is filled with such meaningful oppositions: freedom and captivity; open, bright skies and closed, gloomy homes. Ms. Martel’s cool approach fits di Benedetto’s story and can be just as devastating, especially when she abruptly flips drama into comedy.

Martel and her longtime sound designer Guido Berenblum use inventive audioscapes to draw us into Zama’s fraying subconscious. They approximate the novel’s unreliable first-person narration by rendering several characters’ dialogue and inner monologues into a single, quasi-hallucinatory voiceover, accompanied by ambient sounds that fade in, out, and into each other.