Film Review }{ El Desierto (Christoph Behl, 2013)
It’s a zombie apocalypse in an arid region of Argentina. Ana, Jonathan and Axel form a trio of survivors holed up in a makeshift fortress and entangled in an increasingly awkward love triangle. They monitor the surrounding landscape via a set of microphones positioned around the property, visualized through a quick montage at the film’s outset. There are loudspeakers seemingly present in every room of the house, filling their days and nights with the sounds of wind, insects and howling dogs from outside. And, once in a while, the menacing breath of a zombie, to be dispatched ASAP from their designated shooting windows.
This is El Desierto (The Desert, Christoph Behl, 2013), and it boasts the best film sound design I’ve heard in a long, long time. The official trailer makes a mockery of the proceedings with its generic “high anxiety,” “epic drama,” and “let’s get sentimental” music cues – NONE of which are in the film. In fact, there is no “score” in The Desert whatsoever, and only one single piece of source music positioned strategically towards the end (used to great effect). The rest of the film features a fabulously nuanced approach to the shaping of environmental sound, culled from key plot points and embellished according to the demands of the narrative. As good as case as any to demonstrate Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s notion that “sound design is the new score”. And if you can ignore the conventional scoring elements in this trailer you can glean a few of the key sound design details that make this film so entrancing to listen to.
You get a taste of the film’s approach to soundscaping in the opening moments of the trailer. Pay no attention to the ominous drone, absent in the film, and hear through Ana’s ears as she sits on an interior staircase listening to the sounds of her two friends engaged in an unidentified struggle just outside the house. The reverberation inherent to the architecture of the compound is multiplied by the layering of several microphone positions simultaneously, teetering on the edge of full-blown feedback that increases its intensity as Ana’s fear grows stronger.
This approach to manipulating the exterior soundscape as heard from inside the house carries throughout the film. Levels of reverb, feedback and other system noise are carefully constructed to wax and wane with the ebbs and flows of narrative tension. Yet these fluctuations are kept grounded in the character’s physical environment through a degree of spatial motivation. It’s unclear whether or not every speaker in the house is connected to all the exterior microphones at once, or if different rooms monitor different positions on the outside. But since the trio’s relationship tensions are framed by their continual movements throughout the confined spaces of house, there is ample opportunity for the filmmakers to shift auditory perspectives to play up the differences in speaker type, room dynamics, and microphone position by constantly fluctuating the balance of these elements in the mix. The result is a highly unstable auditory environment that reflects what’s happening in the story every step of the way.
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We are frequently presented with these recordings as though plugged directly into the camera, hearing their voices filtered through the narrow frequency range of the device’s built-in microphones. These filtered voices then blend with other elements of the soundscape as we hear characters playing the tapes back within the spaces of the house, and as the recordings carry over other scenes to act as voice-overs that add another layer of technologically mediated sound to the already thick soundscape of their abode. In this way, the blurring of the boundaries between the inside and outside of the house is conflated with the blurred boundaries between psychological interiority and external communication mediated by the video camera.
And then one day Jonathan and Axel return from one of their excursions in the outside world with more than the usual food and water supplies. It’s a zombie on a leash! They’re going to keep it as a pet…and a punching bag. Don’t ask. Just listen. You can hear the sound of its breathing at the very end of the trailer, a sinister wheeze that could give way to radio static or tape hiss at any moment. Heard a few times in the first half of the film as a menacing sound captured by the exterior microphones and relayed through the household loudspeakers, the interior presence of the zombie keeps some of the texture of this technological mediation intact in the direct presentation of its breathing – suggesting more than just a psychological link between the machinic qualities of these sound technologies and the state of the human body once turned through the bite of a zombie. And in the end, this conflation of technology and the body, made implicit through the trio’s engagement with microphones to reveal both the world outside their house and inside their heads, becomes explicit in Ana’s climactic decision to cross the line between the living and the undead.
The Desert also happens to be the sexiest zombie film ever made. Find it. Hear it. Love it.