‘Death Has No Master’ Review: Asia Argento in Limp Venezuelan Drama

Featuring powerfully atmospheric music and sound design, and a sense of tropical place so moistly palpable one might feel concerned about developing crotch rot after viewing, Venezuelan writer-director Jorge Thielen Armand’s third feature, Death Has No Master, is well dressed up but doesn’t really go anywhere.

Mind you, his previous full-length works, La Soledad and La Fortaleza (Fortitude), were similarly light on action but strikingly moody. However, somehow their arthouse idiosyncrasies felt more audacious. Given that this is his first outing with a relatively well-known star — Asia Argento, playing a woman returning from Europe to Venezuela to sell off her late father’s cacao estate — expectations may have perhaps irrationally piqued that he’d up his game somehow. But the final product doesn’t come to a boil, despite the promising simmering of the first act.

After an ominous maybe-dream/maybe-flashback sequence, never entirely explained, which finds Argento’s protagonist Caro in a ravine where one masked man covered in blood (Roberto Conde) encourages her to kill another (David Tiburcio), the action cuts abruptly to Caro, newly landed in the country. After being stopped by cops looking for a quick bribe, her driver reassures her that Venezuela is much safer now that they’ve killed all the criminals.

Not entirely reassured, but at least in possession of the deeds to her father’s house where she grew up after meeting her lawyer Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich, the director’s father and star of La Fortaleza), Caro arrives at the decrepit mansion. A stone construction decorated with bas-relief Corinthian column motifs with an interior that’s all chipped parquet flooring and shabby chic Victorian furniture, the house is by this point barely separate from the encroaching tropical forest that surrounds it. No wonder Roque has warned her that the house and the land surrounding it are not worth the million dollars she expects; she’ll be lucky if it fetches half that.

But home improvement is the least of Caro’s worries. There are various people living at the house, seemingly at the dispensation of Sonia (Dogreika Tovar, a non-professional with an incredible screen presence). Sonia remembers Caro from the old days when she worked for Caro’s father, and has been at the house for years, living there now with her son Maiko (Yermain Sequera, another find), a kid old enough to be in elementary school if only he were enrolled in one. A tenant (José Aponte) rents a room from Sonia and may sometimes share her bed, while old retainer Yoni (Arturo Rodríguez) also has the run of the estate, especially the plantation. Luckily, his loyalties lie more with Caro, which is lucky as things swiftly turn sour between Caro and Sonia when the former tells the latter she’s going to have to leave so Caro can sell the estate.

Not that we see her getting in the real-estate agents or even doing much about the dead leaves everywhere. After spending a lot of time in bed and looking at mysterious books of illustrations her father left lying about among his Chekhovian rifle and machete, Caro moves to the town for a while to stay in a hotel and plot with Roque about how to get rid of Sonia. The police are clearly not going to help, claiming that Sonia has a right to stay put having lived there more than five years, and anyway, she has other legal claims on the place.

Presumably, this was all filmed well before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, not that the abduction has had much effect on the country’s regime. But it’s clear from the attitude of the locals that no one likes a pushy, arrogant gringa like Caro around these parts, least of all one who struts about in leather boots and a gaucho hat like she owns the place. Well, yes, she does own it technically, but it’s not a good look here, where the sufferings of colonial rule are well remembered. As one policewoman points out, all she’s lacking is a whip. (Don’t worry, there’s also a whip back at the house, which will play a significant role in the story.)

Argento has enough instinctive ferality about her to make her blend well with the less experienced actors, but this is not one of her better performances and the character is very underwritten. The sound and music tracks by Sylvain Bellemare and Vittorio Giampietro, respectively, have to work extra hard to make it feel like something is going to happen, eventually, and it won’t be pretty. Mission accomplished, but that doesn’t quite make for an entirely satisfying viewing experience.