Halley (2012)

Directed by: Sebastian Hofmann
Written by: Julio Chavezmontes, Sebastian Hofmann
Starring: Alberto Trujillo, Luly Trueba 
Rated: R

Calling this a "zombie" movie would be far too disrespectful for what the film attempted to do and what it achieved. Certainly, this is a film about the undead, but perhaps we should simply leave it at that. A zombie flick connotates a certain lack of substance, whereas I believe the term "undead" wants to imply that life was once there. It hints more at a state in between two worlds where a person wanders lost. This film is not about a monster, it is about a man who is medically dead.

This is a strange, grotesque and very human film about a man with an illness. It is not until about half way into the film that we understand that he was never alive to begin with. For a large portion of the film he seemed simply to be a man struggling with a disease that appeared to be eating his body away.

Alberto Trujillo gives a wonderfully sad performance as Alberto, a security guard at a 24-hour gym who exists simply trying to keep his body intact. At its premier, a man in the audience complained to director Sebastian Hofmann that his movie spent far too long in act 1, establishing the character, and that this was a punishment to the audience. Indeed, it did spend a very long time giving a full picture of the day to day life--to use the word liberally--but I believe it was fully necessary. Alberto seems like a man you could pass on the street and never look twice at. There is a scene in which he collapses from his illness and people do just that, they ignore him. His day consists of cleaning his decomposing body, polishing his silver, watching terrible Mexican television and occasionally working. It is a pointless existence, and this monotony must be felt fully before the audience begins to understand what it is he is fighting for and struggling with.

What I gleaned from this film is that the real sickness is loneliness. This man has nobody in his world except the manager of this gym, a beautiful woman whose relationship with him is rather ambiguous. He seems to want to live only to hang on to what little encounters he can still have, what little pleasures are still available to him. It is a zombie flick unlike any that I have ever seen in that it tries to explore with as much sympathy as it can muster the place that someone like him could have in the world. I don't believe that it was his decaying body that he should have been worried about, but rather that his body decaying might have been a blessing.

For much of this movie I did not like what I was watching. It was almost unbearably gruesome in many respects: fingernails being pulled out, chunks of flesh peeling away with a shirt, gore being pushed down a bathtub drain with his foot, and one surprise at the end which I will leave you to enjoy. I assumed that this was a sadistic little movie which took pleasure in making the audience uncomfortable. But towards the end I realized that it was all necessary. These are the trials we can imagine of a man in this situation. He would be caught in a living hell, and every self-applied stitch is one more reminder that his time on earth is pointless.

It is a sparse, incredibly dark film from Mexico, featuring some outstanding makeup work and a fully committed performance from Trujillo. There is little dialogue, but he says everything he needs to and so much more with his body language more than anything else. I expect that it was a physically demanding role to play, but he tackled it fully, and with an obviously close bond to his director created a disturbing piece on what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.

3/4