In Iván Fund’s black-and-white drama “The Message,” the commodification of the spiritual and the sterilizing of childhood wonder go hand in hand. They’re also, rather ironically, accompanied by sanitized drama, despite the movie’s emotionally potent subject matter: a young girl who allegedly communicates with the souls of people’s pets, both alive and dead.
The Argentinian countryside plays host to life on the road for an unusual trio during a period of economic downturn. Radiant, gifted pre-teen Anika (Anika Bootz) serves as a medium for animals on the brink of death, or those who have already reached the other side. Meanwhile, her opportunistic guardians Myriam (Mara Bestelli) and Roger (Marcello Subiotto) relay her messages to pet owners and negotiate payments for her readings, respectively.
There’s nothing particularly sinister about their dynamic, even though Roger occasionally wanders off in a huff, and Myriam ensures that Anika always has an intermediary, despite the young girl intuiting incredibly meaningful and poetic messages left for human companions. In fact, the premise remains at a standstill between its opening and closing credits, leaving uncertain what the movie is even about at its core. (This plateau prompted numerous walkouts throughout the film’s Berlin press screening.) A handful of melancholy moments — during which Anika gazes wistfully out of the trio’s van window, or yearns for spare change in exchange for her fallen baby teeth — gesture towards some lingering emptiness in her life.
Popular on Variety
However, each gap is filled soon thereafter during the trio’s mostly uneventful travels. The question of Anika’s immediate family rears its head on occasion, becoming especially relevant when Myriam claims, to a curious TV news crew, that all the women in her family share this telepathic gift. A visit to Anika’s mother at a mental health institution threatens to introduce dramatic complexity, but this too is quickly brushed under the rug, in lieu of more landscapes passing by, and all semblance of substance along with them. Even the easiest material with which to pull on viewers’ heartstrings — the relationships between people and their innocent pets — barely enters the spotlight, and prevents any rumination on either Anika’s methods, or the impact of her words on her clientele.
If “The Message” has one major strength, it’s Bootz. The young lead has a wonderfully magnetic presence, veering between youthful frolic and pensive gloom, even though the film rarely creates circumstances where the latter makes sense. These shifts in mood are often matched by Mauro Mourelos’ score, which uses horns in various tones and iterations to capture these transitions, but these musical highlights — much like the effect of its performances — are far more observed than felt, a fallout of an artistic approach that proves too matter-of-fact for the material at hand.
It’s a film of flesh and blood that leaves little room for imagination, or ethereal possibility. Its musings on the spiritual — or even on the innocent, the naïve, the youthful — begin and end in the realm of documentarian literalism. Its young protagonist has the spark of something magical, but at no point does the camera capture her as if there’s anything more to her than the van in which she rides, or the window through which she watches the world pass her by, rendering her without much interiority beyond the function with which she’s shouldered. This framework could, in theory, serve a metatextual purpose, but the film’s stylizations rarely deviate from it even in brief moments of greater joy and intimacy. The result is a flattened film that, in the process of trying to capture the suppression and restraint of something graceful and unspoken, flattens it in the process too.