Horizonte (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time Basilio addresses his mother
Take a Drink: for every new and terrifying room
Take a Drink: whenever we meet someone the son has killed
Take a Drink: when mother and son talk about their own deaths or try and kill each other
Do a Shot: when we only hear the horrors
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
It is no mystery to anyone with even the broadest knowledge of world history over the last fifty plus years that Colombia is a nation that has had more than its fair share of strife and conflict. It’s a land of great natural and cultural beauty, an irony that does not escape its great artists.
Horizonte begins with the reunion of a mother and her son in a gothic twilight. We soon realize they are both dead, and that to progress in this afterlife they must look backwards- at the violence that defined their lifetimes, and their own place in it.
A Toast
From the very first second of this film, we are treated to spectacular, haunting imagery courtesy of the eye of director César Augusto Acevedo and the talents of DP Mateo Guzman. They have created a netherworld that feels like an immersive art installation that surrounds and envelopes you despite the restrictions of two dimensions.
As we journey with mother and son, this story begins to feel apiece with the magical realism that the literary giants of this country pioneered, gifted the world. Or perhaps it’s even something out of Greek Myth- an Iliad of the Damned.
It turns out even ghosts can go on a journey of self-discovery, particularly ghosts as much perpetrators as victims in the cycles of violence that plagued their lives and their nation. They must face the horrors they suffered and particularly the horrors they or their progeny committed, yes, but also the glimmers of humanity that remained in their victims, and themselves. There’s hope there, and perhaps even the seeds of something new, something better.
Beer Two
Two hours is quite a long journey indeed when it’s this shape-shifting and elusive, but it really does draw you in after you get your footing on its approach.
Verdict
Horizonte is a beautiful, horrible purgatorial journey through decades of cruelty in the history of Colombia through the eyes of two ghosts, who locate on the other side the hope they never had while living.
