ANGUSTIA

What do you see? As an optometrist assistant, John Pressman is just a dark lab technician. In the clinic, he is the unquestioned master of a magnificent collection of eyeballs lovingly displayed on impressive rows of formalin-filled jars. Back home, he suffers under the yoke of his ball-crushing mother, keen on divination, who spends her time hypnotising him. What do you see this time? Under his mother’s control, John will hideously get revenge for one too caustic patient’s humiliation and… surprise! What you were watching was only a movie – of which the high intolerance forces Patty, an audience member, to take refuge in the toilets when John, the obese technician, enters the cinema… and takes Patty hostage! Yes, that is what you saw! Now, take a look at your neighbour who is a bit too dynamic beside you. Could it be John who is getting ready to savagely remove your eyes? You won’t believe your eyes! Anguish, directed by the Catalan Bigas LUNA, is a Russian doll – a movie in another movie – of truths that erase other ones. The movie “contains ingenious treasures to embarrass its audience at the most. It is impossible to see whether the show is happening on screen or in reality. It is an ever-approved phenomenon. We knew that Bigas LUNA was capable of establishing heavy and oppressive atmospheres (Caniche), but not that he was so good at manipulation. It is a bit as if fiction consumed the real world, as if the big screen had no more limits. Nothing like Demons by the BAVA/ARGENTO duo.” – Marc TOULLEC “Madness, perversion and horror are the least for this filmmaking with unusual surprises and some most ‘gory’ sequences.” – Salvador SAINZ Starring Zelda RUBINSTEIN, Poltergeist’s little woman, as the mother.