Perhaps horror isn't exactly the right word to describe this eerie, bloody, sexy movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 20, 2017

[Amat Escalante's] film may lack the subtlety of Val Lewton's famously allusive RKO chillers, but there's the same sense that the shadowy rooms braved by the characters are no less than the human psyche itself.

| Sep 7, 2017

Despite the avowed debt to Andrzej Żuławski's famously disturbing 1981 film Possession, this is bracingly individual stuff. Just don't expect to touch calamari again in a hurry.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2017

An uneasy hybrid of gritty Mexican drama and weird, David Cronenberg-style body horror.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 17, 2017

This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2017

For better or worse, you won't be forgetting this one in a hurry.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2017

An explicit and excoriating story of eros unmoored and unmooring - the devastating power of sexual pleasure when it's stripped of both function and meaning.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 11, 2017

Escalante draws remarkable performances out of his cast of mostly newcomers in this film about the consequences of pleasure and the many meanings of flesh; where animal intelligence fills the void left by emotional disconnect.

| Aug 9, 2017

The unsure approach to rich material (based on a story about a newspaper's homophobic coverage of a drowned man) mixes the sexy and grotesque - and cancels each other's good parts out.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 2, 2017

The film's music score is both high-strung and ominous -- at times ringing like the aftermath of a shotgun blast and at others slow and dark like a body being dragged across a floor.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 27, 2017

...a fantastical premise collides with Escalante's solemn realism, making for a quiet, unforgettable mash-up, inspired by director Andrzej Zulawski's Possession.

| Jul 24, 2017

A low-key trippy sci-fi movie about booty calls with an unwieldy space squid, but I wish I could say it was much more than that.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 21, 2017

Once it wraps its tentacles around you, The Untamed doesn't let go -- and you might not want it to.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 21, 2017

There is a fine line between horror and humor, and if you adjust your angle of vision accordingly, you can see the architecture of farce beneath the ornamentation of shock and suffering.

| Jul 20, 2017

A carefully controlled tone, which never jumps into full-blown luridness despite ample opportunity to do so, helps us believe in the severity of the situation and the struggles of the characters.

| Jul 20, 2017

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It's just a pity that its human side doesn't measure up to its inhuman one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 17, 2017

Each brief glimpse of the creature's fleshy, slithering mass imbues the character drama with an aching sexual desire and, as the violent potential of the entity becomes clear, a mounting sense of dread.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 14, 2017

Plays like an acknowledgement that the hiddenness, the private nature of sexuality is also part of its power.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 22, 2016

In all honesty The Untamed doesn't seem to go anywhere special. But connoisseurs of oddness may cherish it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2016

While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, "The Untamed" never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.

| Sep 5, 2016