LA VIDA ME MATA (Life Kills Me) Review

Gaspar is a struggling, twenty-something year old cameraman, still living at home with his elder sister, mentally ill mother and invalid grandfather.  A solitary young man Gaspar has never recovered from the death of the older brother he adored six years before, a brother his elder sister stills tries to contact via a ouija board.  Lost in his own sadness Gaspar simply shuts out everyone around him, preferring to contemplate his own death which he attempts to bring about – badly – whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Life begins to change for Gaspar when his current employer – a hysterically self absorbed artiste and self styled auteur self producing what must be one of the worst short films ever made – drags him against his will to the funeral of a friend’s sister, a young girl who simply collapsed without warning on her birthday.  At the funeral Gaspar meets Alvaro.  Like Gaspar Alvaro is obsessed with death, but unlike Gaspar Alvaro sees nothing negative about it.  Death, to him, is a gift, something to be embraced and explored, a thing of beauty in and of itself.  As a friendship between the two grows Alvaro pushes Gaspar to confront and appreciate death through most unusual means – most memorably by buying and killing a bird and then by visiting a morgue to touch the corpses – and Gaspar slowly becomes convinced that Alvaro, impossibly, is the reincarnation of his dead brother.

Thanks to a poorly chosen introductory device – we begin with the death of the teenaged girl, a thread immediately and totally dropped once it accomplishes the introduction of our two leads – and Gaspar’s reclusive nature, La Vida Me Mata is a film that needs a bit of room to breathe before it really gets rolling.  The viewer needs a moment to acclimatize themselves and lock into Silva’s unusual world before things really click but click they do around the fifteen minute mark and by the time the credits roll the film has become an entirely immersive experience.  As befits Gaspar’s bleak view of life Silva shoots the bulk of the film in black and white, the only color coming within the confines of the hilariously bad film within the film, for whatever else you may say about its star she certainly embraces life in a way nobody else in the film even approaches. 

Stark though Gaspar’s world may be, however, it is certainly not bland.  If only he would open his eyes and look around him a little he would find a multitude of fantastical flourishes, Silva having loaded his world with surprising touches.  There is one particularly memorable dream sequence but that fantastic frequently invades the real world as well, Silva showing a remarkable ability to indulge his flights of fancy without breaking the overall tone of the piece.

As odd and even transgressive as the film is at times – for all his good intentions Alvaro clearly has issues as significant as Gaspar’s own and they express themselves in ways that Gaspar quite correctly points out are illegal – La Vida Me Mata is a refreshing and effective look at our uneasy relationship with death.  There are those who wish to rush into it early.  There are those who let it invade and bleed dry their every day lives.  There are those who struggle in vain against it.  In the end, however, it is simply a part of the natural order of things and something to be embraced in its proper place.  Silva proves himself here to be a remarkable young talent with a strong voice, clear vision and enough raw talent to make the transition between mediums appear simple.  Expect great things.

Related Links

• La Vida Me Mata website
• Silva's art website
• And just because it makes me laugh, the dancing man in the animated mask is director Sebastian Silva