In her 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin grapples with the aftermath of a near-fatal bear attack in the Siberian wilderness, an attack which left her mutilated and also threw her life out of balance in a more philosophical and spiritual sense. Her friend, Andrey, articulates her encounter and miraculous survival thusly: “He didn’t mean to kill you, he wanted to mark you. Now you are medka, she who lives between the worlds.” Medka is a word used by the Evens people to describe those who have been “marked by the bear” — survivors of bear attacks that are henceforth considered to be half human, half bear.
Like Martin, Ada (Mariana Di Girolamo), the main character in Lucía Puenzo’s Electrophilia, has a similar encounter with a terrifying, unknowable force of nature; one, however, that doesn’t come in animal form and on which something akin to reason can be mapped out even less: lightning. Waking up from an induced six-week coma, the young veterinarian finds herself a changed woman after a lightning strike nearly kills her. Understandably confused at first, she quickly notices changes of a more permanent nature. Not only is she more sensitive to light and sound, but she appears to have come down with a bad case of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a condition very much rooted in the world of pseudoscience in the real world but treated as genuine by the film.
But the biggest changes come via Ada’s vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, an apparent ability to produce charges of electricity (though she cannot control them), and a noticeable decline in her mental stability. While this works to isolate her from the people in her life and makes a return to her previous routine difficult, Ada falls in with a group of lightning strike survivors who seek to reclaim their experience and embrace the various changes they have gone through after the fact. This group is led by Juan (Germán Palacios), an enigmatic doctor who seeks to understand the nature of the survivors’ condition.
There’s an obvious parallel in Electrophilia to David Cronenberg’s 1996 erotic drama Crash: character goes through traumatic event, event changes them in unexpected ways, character falls in with a group of people (led by a charismatic doctor) in a similar predicament (or in the case of Crash, with a similar predilection), and the allure of outer-limit experiences exerts an inexplicable and strangely, disturbingly sexual pull. Granted, with Puenzo, the sensuality is executed in a more muted manner, but the comparison is plain nonetheless. When Juan administers electroconvulsive therapy to Ada, she moans and writhes in both discomfort and pleasure, her face bright with a relief that resembles post-orgasmic bliss once the treatment concludes. The ensuing affair — Ada is already in a relationship with Jano (Guillermo Pfening) — between researcher and subject is pretty much a given at this point.
But this reflects a kind of duality that is unfortunately rare otherwise. There is no living “between the worlds” in Electrophilia, nor is there a sense of profound change to Ada aside from her emotional volatility and choice instances of sexual recklessness. Unlike the real-life Martin or Crash‘s fictitious cast of car crash junkies, Ada’s body is neither scarred by the savage claw marks of a wild animal nor the industrial, metallic force of an automobile that renders her a kind of human-animal or human-machine hybrid. (Even her more base appetites seem to be the stuff of a midlife crisis, rather than a life-altering brush with death.) Instead, her body is marked by the comparatively elegant and minimal patterns of a Lichtenberg figure, a relatively tasteful reminder of the ordeal she endured.
As indicated by this difference, Ada’s journey into “electrophilia” doesn’t take her to the outer edges of her consciousness, psychology, or humanity. Puenzo provides flashbacks that tether her film to subject matter that feels painfully familiar — complaining about what this familiarity is, one can’t help but feel like a broken record at this point: namely, childhood trauma. Her distrust of psychotropic drugs (suggested and administered by her doctor father, played by Osmar Núñez) ties back into memories she has of her mother, and this renders Ada’s feelings and motivations too legible while never taking the film outside the realm of its educated middle-class scope.
For all her trouble and for all the drama the film suggests, Ada’s ostensible exploration of the unknown drives her right back into the arms of a comfortable (and monogamous) existence. A little wiser (perhaps), therapized (certainly), and a little more aware of what lies beyond; but there is no sense of a cycle truly being broken, no moment that could be seen as a liberatory breakthrough — not even a desperate, if unsuccessful, grasp at it. At one point in her memoir, Martin writes that “all is permitted when you are rising from your own ashes.” Reading about the break-your-chest-open-and-let-your-guts-spill-out changes she went through again and again, her statement is heavy with meaning. One wishes Puenzo would’ve envisioned her main character’s arc in a similar way.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 1.
