Death Has No Master (Fantastic Fest 2026)

There is something drained, sickly, in the very colours of Jorge Thielen Armand’s film, which makes its way to Fantastic Fest from a successful Cannes premiere. I’m uncertain whether the film was shot digitally or on celluloid – whisper it around Christopher Nolan, but you can’t always tell these days – but it feels very different to the desaturation of a lot of digitally-shot streaming “content”. It is a faded look, the look of an old Polaroid, of something that’s been left out in the sun. It turns out to be a very effective look for this story, a story about the embers of an old-world colonialism coming up against something that is unnervingly even older.

It stars Asia Argento as Caro, a woman flying in from Italy to check out the Venezuelan plantation she’s been left in a relative’s will. She finds it run down and – more troublingly – occupied by locals. What follows is, after a fashion, a home invasion movie, albeit one where both sides believe they’re the rightful occupants and the other side are the invaders. The metaphor for colonialism is clear, so clear that Armand doesn’t need to press it too hard. The mood of the film is fraught, unsettling, its anger a constant subterranean note rather than a combustible element. It is not quite a horror movie but it is certainly nightmarish; whose nightmare it is, exactly, is open to debate.

There’s something refreshingly mature and non-polemical about this. It’s not Armand’s fault that, a few months ahead of his film’s premiere, the issue of Venezuela’s relationship to wider imperial powers was bumped up the global priorities list with the Trump regime’s kidnapping of the country’s President Nicolas Maduro. For all its anti-colonialist slant, the film is hardly a whitewash of Maduro’s regime. The one character who seems to think the country is being run well is the taxi driver who takes Caro to the plantation, who eagerly talks up the local police for having “killed all the criminals – before, it was hell”. The politics of Death Has No Master are conducted at an interpersonal level, with Caro complaining that the natives never paid her rent, and the natives feeling Caro has failed at other social obligations that her very European perspective doesn’t even take into account.

Death Has No Master is a slow-burn, with the title card making its debut twenty-three minutes in. A more surprising piece of deferred gratification is that Argento doesn’t have a violent screaming fit for fifty minutes. The question of whether Argento should still be playing the lead in movies is one viewers will have to make for themselves. Her status as a whistleblower against abuse in Hollywood and an abuser herself makes her the most fraught figure of the #MeToo era, and this is before we’ve raised the issue of her partner Anthony Bourdain’s suicide. Her appeal was always transgressive – viewers of her directorial debut Scarlet Diva will be aware she was always comfortable airing her messiness – but even admirers of transgressive figures can have their limits.

It’s hard to imagine Death Has No Master bringing her back into the Hollywood mainstream, if only because it’s bizarre to remember Asia Argento was ever on Hollywood’s radar in the first place. It is mercifully not the kind of film that tries to generate an edgy frisson from casting a controversial figure, in the way a tiresome amount of modern New York indies do. There is one ill-judged part where she gives a child alcohol, although she then tells the boy’s mother not to let him in her room again, which is something. But the most uncomfortable thing about Argento’s performance here is how good it is. Maybe it’s just maturing, rather than a marker of what she’s been through, but all the extroverted excess of her early roles is turned inwards. Caro has a tic of pressing her hands and face, kneading them like bread, taking the violence out on herself. It’s a perfectly uncomfortable performance for a perfectly uncomfortable movie, and if some of that discomfort is extra-textual, at least it doesn’t lazily rest on it.

Death Has No Master is a slow death trip, to be filed alongside Monos, El Topo and Herzog’s South American films. Its hypnotic slowness can tip over into actually dragging, but part of that slowness comes from Armand’s ruthlessness in stripping out any kind of pulp cliche from his narrative. (The film features perhaps the most visually restrained ayahuasca trip in movie history, and it’s no less powerful for that) It has a cause but it leaves the soapbox at home, preferring a simmering anger that occasionally becomes bracingly nihilistic. Its key line of dialogue is “There is no land, there is no god, there is no house, there is nothing” – but, of course, there is death, and death is indigenous to every nation.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – DEATH HAS NO MASTER