Two ghosts on a journey of terror

If ghosts change on earth, they often have an order to do; At least in films this is the case. In order to find admission in heaven, they return to life and appear as a rescuer in need or even as a guardian angel. But there is another way, as the film « Horizonte » proves: a sky can be searched in vain here. The drama tells a story of searching and finding, a story of misdeeds, forgiveness and the way there.

Back to the mother

At the center of the plot is Basilio (Claudio Cataño), who was separated from his parents as a teenager and now returns to his parents’ house as a kind of spirit after his death. In the dilapidated little building, which seemed more friendly and inviting in his memory and is now surrounded by defective fences and withered plants, he finds inés (Paulina García), his mother, who no longer wants to recognize her son.

In search of the father or husband, the mother-son duo strips through the surroundings and is confronted with destruction: the civil war demanded its toll … and thousands of deaths. Basilio itself seems to have been one of the responsible ones, because he gradually meets his victims. First, a man confronts him and asks about his motivation. However, the perpetrator, even a young adult, does not find a satisfactory answer.

In the meantime, his mother recognizes what has become of her son during the time he was separated from her. « How was it to give birth to such a monster? », A woman wants to know from her that son and husband lost. But as a mother, Inés Basilio does not deviate from the side despite great criticism she practices. The shared search welds the two together.

« Horizonte » is the second film of the Colombian César Augusto Acevedo, born in 1987. His first work « La Tierra y la Sombra » (« Land and Shade ») attracted great attention ten years ago: The drama received the « Caméra d’Or » at the Cannes film festival in 2015, with which the best debut film by a director has been awarded every year since 1978. « La Tierra y la sombra » is about a family who suffers from a separation and is threatened with loss. Topics that are also taken up again in « horizons ».

The break in the family and the loss are in the past: and they not only affect the protagonists themselves. Basilio and inés stand for a large number of people who have been severely hit in Colombia by the past events. An armed conflict has been under control by the country for decades. However, Acevedo largely bypasses a direct representation of the war.

Invisible horror

The cinema viewers experience the horror through pictures and noises. Betting holes and coffins, which are probably borne to the final resting place in a funeral procession, are the evidence of the atrocities. The snapping of weapon loads, shots and heavily breathing people, who cannot be seen, acoustically take a look into the terrible past.

And again and again Inés meets, who himself was only indirectly the victim of the war and died of natural death (or because of a broken heart), people who remind her of the deeds of her son. She looks almost disgusted by his actions in the years before his death, is so touched by the fate of the victims that she even symbolically kills her son.

In connection with some sacred music, director César Augusto Acevedo succeeds in a moving, slowly told filmic work that tells of a war and crime against humanity without bringing killing himself.

He sends his characters, who were victims of the system in a cruel world, which she surrounded, on a spiritual journey, on a path to which the two individuals are to be completed. But this is not easy, because confrontation with the past does not necessarily lead to the desired redemption.