Zona (2007)

80%

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Clever critique of gated communities and their false unity based on hating the outside world. Like monasteries and convents, such institutions become prisons for their inhabitants as they retreat from worldly responsibility into a world where affiliation is based on an ever decreasing gene pool of available friends and marriage partners. This leads to the increasingly hostility and self-destructive tendencies on show here, as the community must be protected at all costs. What price social snobbery is the question being asked when the culture so created is more concerned with simply surviving than with developing, enhancing and improving.

The increasing desire for protection from the lower-class created by the very social snobbery that fears its own creation induces the characters here to seek physical segregation. But this is security at the price of genuine knowledge of the world and of how to make the best of things because no objective criteria for social acceptance is ever established or wanted - just the vague feeling that one is secure. Only the worst kind of people want to live that way because they hope to hide their true selves from a world they want to control to suit their own pre existing ideology.

A thriller that is about more than just cheap thrills yet which never fully explains the reasoning behind its existence - irrational fear. Yet the characterization and acting is superb; making the movie completely engrossing. All the characters speak from their own point of view and not just from the creator's viewpoint so that we come to understand them as people not just as a motley collection of heroes and villains. A kind of Escape from New York in reverse.

Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.