Luck of the Irish is all well and good, but how about luck of the Spaniard? Or the Jews? They're more powerful than you think. So powerful, in fact, that men would kill for them. You'll find this in Spain's 2001 quasi-fantasy Intacto, a stylishly-shot feature debut from Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who later directed 28 Weeks Later and is currently slated to deliver the BioShock movie.
Driven by the human fallibility of its flawed characters as much as a series of quaint mini-games, Intacto is an introspective thriller with a paranormal premise. Consider, the film asks, that luck operates like any other commodity. It can be won, played with, gambled away or even stolen. What, then, would its seedy underbelly look like? It’s an original and Hollywood-ready premise that would make an easy sci-fi pleaser, hence my surprise that, 8 years later, we still don’t have a more mainstream remake of this gem (not that I’m complaining, mind you).
Luck in Intacto is surprisingly not that different from wealth; some people are just born into it, but others can work to achieve more of it. Federico (Eusebio Poncela) was once one of the lucky ones, working as the right-hand man for the luckiest man on Earth, an elusive Holocaust survivor named Samuel Berg (Max von Sydow), but more ominously known only as The Jew. As the film opens, Berg steals away Federico’s luck and has him beaten and banished from his elite desert casino. In vengeance, Federico recruits Tomas, a bank robber who caught his attention by being the sole survivor of an airplane disaster, to participate in a series of underground "luck" challenges in which the winner plays Berg in a game of extreme Russian Roulette. Five bullets instead of one, guaranteeing the death of the challenger if Berg survives the first shot—which he always does.
Fatal gambles like that drive the story forward, while teasing at the kind of movie Intacto could've been; one that places emphasis only on the mechanics of the luck competitions. Creatively absurd as they are—the most exciting one involves the contestants running blindfolded into a forest and hoping not to Scout Trooper into a tree—the film remembers to use these games as character revelations rather than just fun asides. There's this odd disconnect in that you kind of want more and crazier games, but at the same time respect the script's restraint.
What does it do to someone if they know that luck is tangible and that they have more of it than others? The characters in Intacto all seem to recognize that their luck is a curse, as they have pretty awful (you might even say unlucky) backgrounds that they miraculously survived. In truth, it's a film about survivor's guilt and the range of coping stages a person goes through when fate chooses to reward them over others. A cop character starts to believe her luck powers killed her own family. A famous bullfighter has an unfulfilled death wish. Max von Sydow's role is relatively small, but greatly memorable and suited for him, paying off in a speech where Berg recounts his experience in a Nazi concentration camp, evading execution after execution by sheer luck. They're all hounded by their own perseverance, just by believing in the film's premise: the tangibility of luck.
Despite dealing with elements in the story that bend the rules of the real world, director Fresnadillo doesn't like to point them out, treating the film instead as a straight crime story mixed with a somber reverie of the culpability of people's actions. That's what it gives Intacto its unique mood: a cross between lowlife noir and ambiguous magic. The kind of magic that's well within the realm of possibility, but with evidence stacking against them being coincidences. Then again, isn't that essentially what luck is—a series of coincidences that works in your favor? The vagueness of it is wonderfully handled in this movie, allowing it to alternately be sensational and darkly intimate.
Lions Gate released Intacto on DVD in 2003, and it's still available to purchase
Watch Out! is a feature on JustPressPlay where Arya Ponto showcases lesser-known, lesser-appreciated and often bizarre small films that are cool and deserve to get some attention. Venture here to see all previous entries.
