The suspense debut of the screenwriter and director Diego Freitas in feature films invites us to observe the protagonist to assemble the puzzle of a fragmented mind. The movie that won an award at the Montreal Festival brings a very different cinematographic perspective, having an aesthetic that, despite being dark, is wonderful to look at.
Nicolas Prattes in a memorable performance merges into Davi, a Serial Killer whose hobby is filming other people without them seeing him. In the academic coexistence with Jonatas, taking a master’s degree, for whom he develops a certain fascination, he ends up having an insight of liberation that implies the death of other people, the first of them being an elderly neighbor. Davi films the act without revealing his identity and is famous for publishing this and other crimes on the internet.
Davi is undoubtedly a multi-layered character and was certainly played with a lot of dedication, as it was Prattes’ first film. The actor who does not live in São Paulo, the filming location, had to move and live for a while in a city hotel, making his experience and deepening in the Stanislavskian protagonist more viable. His daily rehearsal began in pre-production where it was passed scene by scene with Freitas’ sensitivity, resulting in a character who speaks with his eyes and has a real psychopath face.
With a bet on the daring and diversified, there are different moments marked by the light in which photography exalts the beauty of the landscapes and inserts destructive elements. In this thriller with high doses of psychological drama, Diego Freitas makes a beautiful debut by telling the life of a murderer with such a fragmented mind.
There is a poetic license mixed with a contemplative photography full of symbolism. Religious symbols, with the presence of a dove, Maria (played by Neusa Maria Faro), Davi, Jonatas (André Hendges), Eden, which is the place where Davi wants to take Jonatas and Praça de Deus. There are symbols referring to Guillermo del Toro such as aesthetic light, Darren Aronofsky with an aggressive art direction, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick in their narratives and creation of tangible characters.
Through the plot we observe that the story is of a boy who commits barbaric crimes in search of love, starting from a lack he seeks a loving family feeling that he never had. The viewer follows the plot from David’s point of view, we see what he sees making us sympathize with his found layers.
The script, which has a version written in just two weeks as an order from a distributor, has symbols of the director’s life, such as leaving home early, along with fantastic realism and many metaphors. The Secret of David is a horror with drama and suspense focused on the protagonist’s mind, which takes risks in the unusual and makes great use of a seemingly simple premise.
You can find The Secret of David on GloboPlay lasting 114 Minutes.
Did you like the content? So leave a comment to let me know!
See you in the next text.