E24 | The Wasteland (Film)

<p>SPAIN, THE 19TH CENTURY. The war-torn country prompted some of its residents to set up homesteads on the most desolate scraggled plains ever to be home to a lot of twigs jutting from the hard ground like the desiccated limbs of corpses grasping in vain at an empty, gray, uncaring sky. So it’s only a slightly better place to raise a family than the suburbs! Salvador (Roberto Alamo) is the dad, Lucia (Inma Cuesta) is the mom and Diego (Asier Flores) is their boy, who wakes up in the middle of the night so terrified by the creepy figurines his mother carves for him, he drops and shatters his chamber pot. (It was empty, phew.) He wakes his dad who grabs a rifle and escorts the boy through the hovering mist and chilly blue moonlight to the outhouse on the edge of the property so Diego can kegel his hyperboreal pelvic floor muscles and coax terrified dribbles of urine out so he can go back to bed and not sleep much. Poor kid needs a damn hug.</p><p><br></p><p>Thankfully, Lucia is a wondermom. She has to be, since Salvador appears to have the emotional demeanor of a brick of old meatballs that’s been in the back of the freezer since 1997. Who can blame him, since they spend their days working a shitty shitty farm where they raise forlorn sheep and anxious bunnies, and yank vegetables from the bloodless, chalky earth, surely the most wretched vegetables ever to provide joyless nutrition, like cabbage and turnips. On the edge of the farm they’ve erected scarecrows that loom like crucifixion crosses, marking an invisible line that shall not be crossed, like, you know, thou shall not encroach upon the territory of the local chupacabras, or whatever.<br>Salvador wants Diego to club a bunny so they can eat it, but the kid ain’t quite there yet, prompting Lucia to whisk him away so they can play and be lighthearted, thus establishing the dynamic where one parent wants to preserve the child’s innocence as long as possible, and the other wants him to learn the harsh truth of where his dinner comes from. Ol’ Salvador