THE STORY – A punk kid gets superpowers from alcohol and tries to reshape society, but a violent error sparks global tensions with him at the center.
THE CAST – Diego Bravo, Ramón Gálvez, Rodrigo Lisboa, Antonia Mccarthy, & Rosa Peñaloza
THE TEAM – Diego Fuentes (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 71 Minutes
You can find so much delight in watching a movie that feels like it was made by a group of friends. Not in an amateurish sense, but where everyone on screen and behind the camera truly believes in what they’re doing. Diego “Mapache” Fuentes’s debut feature, “Matapanki,” set in Chile, has that energy in every frame. Having its Canadian premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, it’s scrappy, loud, and one of the coolest debuts in a long time.
Ricardo (Ramón Gálvez), a young punk running with a tight crew of friends, stumbles on a mystery drink at an illegal concert. When American men in suits storm in shooting, he drinks it. What follows is visualized through scribbles of color, drawn directly onto the black-and-white film, resembling the art on a punk band’s CD cover. It’s an inventive touch that recurs whenever Ricardo takes a drink and powers surface: yellow and red flame-like squiggles loop around his hands, a cartoon circle of stars appears when his superstrength hits connect. This punchy, DIY visual language makes the film inventive and fun to watch, along with the choice to film in a square, boxy aspect ratio. The cinematography has a grainy black-and-white quality, like watching a fuzzy old TV, that takes a minute to adjust to but feels essential to the film’s punk texture.
The titular matapanki, we’re told by narration and visualized through archival riot and protest footage stitched into the film’s opening, is a power that’s existed for millennia, asleep in the hearts of punk warriors, historically awakening in those needed to defend their territories. Only those with the fighting gene can awaken it, and the “enemy” has tried and failed to harness it themselves. It’s a clean metaphor: those who stand up for what’s right, who challenge the norm, are more powerful than anyone trying to take that power from them.
Ricardo doesn’t want to be a superhero. That’s stated outright, and it’s one of the more interesting threads the film pulls on. Scenes of him testing his strength have a real energetic charge, matched beat for beat by a punk rock score, but the film doesn’t let the power fantasy stay fun for long. He tears a thief’s arm off while trying to help someone get their phone back. When his friend Claudia (Antonia McCarthy) pushes back on him for not embracing his power, noting that he always talks about going against the system, you can feel a performance wrestling with the idea. After a loss, Ricardo shaves his head and disappears like Batman into the dark, even from his own friends. The American men in suits who planted the drink for Ricardo to find as part of a larger scheme begin to see him as a weapon of power.
The film’s satirical target isn’t subtle: an American president who draws literal power from screen time and camera attention (a none-too-veiled jab at how a certain real president seems to feed off exactly that) trying to extract matapanki, and by extension Chile’s power, for total US dominance. This hit is fair and well-aimed, and the film’s critique of colonialism and imperialism lands because it’s very much still a ridiculous reality. The fight between Ricardo and the president (played by Rodrigo Lisboa), rendered in those same vibrating hand-drawn colors, is one of the film’s best sequences.
Where the film stumbles is in its structure. It does feel quite aimless at times. The plot beats are there, and in hindsight you can trace how they connect, but they don’t come together cleanly. The whole plot’s connection to the US, and Ricardo’s power being planted as an experiment, feel underdeveloped.
Still, there’s a lot to admire in a movie this scrappy and this sincere about what it’s saying. It has a visual aesthetic that resembles some Japanese media and “La Haine”‘s brand of youth rebellion, with leather jackets and mohawks and nowhere to put your anger but into each other. Fuentes finds real rage here without letting it form into hatred; instead, it feeds a creative, radical spirit. By the end, you feel how one person’s power can become the spark for a whole movement, and it’s hard not to think of the real-world lineage the film is drawing on.
“Matapanki” is a fantastic example of underground filmmaking, a raucous and radical piece that’s an absolute blast to watch.
