“An intriguing but not wholly satisfying film, despite the gut punch it leaves you with.”

Revenge is a dish best served cold, the old Klingon proverb goes. It applies just as well in the highlands of Venezuela’s northwest, no matter how muggy this cradle of cacao is. But vengeance is self-destructive as well. A reflection on his native country, Venezuelan director Jorge Thielen Armand’s third feature Death Has No Master shows that lawlessness can only lead to a cycle of violence. Sticking firmly to its genre codes, this psychological tale of revenge deals less overtly with Venezuela’s crisis than Armand’s previous works La Soledad and La Fortaleza, but it is there, haunting the dilapidated mansion at the heart of the story like a beast prowling the jungle that surrounds it. Death Has No Master is driven more by atmosphere than a complex narrative, but with its distinct ’70s feel and pacing will delight lovers of moody genre cinema that doesn’t shy away from violence, even if it is futile in the end.

Caro (Asia Argento) returns to Venezuela after decades of living abroad to sell her late father’s cacao plantation, only to find its mansion, her former home, occupied by the plantation’s workers. A fragile balance between her and Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), the face of the small group of squatters, quickly devolves into vicious animosity when Caro makes clear that she wants them out, and Sonia plays her trump card of claiming her young son Maiko is Caro’s father’s child. Retreating from the hacienda and holing up in a dingy hotel in town, Caro calls in her handler Roque for help (it is not explicitly said, but this character could be a tie to the main character of La Fortaleza, given that this Roque too is played by the director’s father Jorge Thielen Hedderich, a recurring presence in Armand’s films). This will set off a spiral of violence that ends in an orgasm of blood.

Violence, or the threat of it, is everywhere in the Venezuela of Death Has No Master. It is there almost as soon as Caro enters the country, it is in the stories people tell her, it is in children discussing murder without emotion. As one of the characters says, “the law here doesn’t work“. Death Has No Master very much plays out like a Western in which there are no heroes, and where the battle over the hacienda is a comment on the state of the country as a whole. The plot isn’t overly complicated, but the morals of its characters are. Caro acts as a stand-in for the corrosive effects of colonialism, while Sonia represents the country’s lawlessness. The mansion, poorly maintained and in a state of decay, is a metaphor for Venezuela itself, and the sobering ending makes clear that violence is generational.

Trying to enhance the feeling of paranoia, the film evokes the atmosphere and slow burn of thrillers of the 1970s (think Deliverance) through its grainy cinematography and brooding soundscape. Slow paced and without much incident until its explosive finale, not all elements that it uses to raise the tension work. Repeated incantations that sound like magic spells do not add up to much; nor do the nightmarish, Dante-esque etchings in a book Caro finds in her father’s library provide much insight into either story or theme. They add to the film’s atmosphere, but feel like Armand trying to insert commentary without making a point. That makes Death Has No Master an intriguing but not wholly satisfying film, despite the gut punch it leaves you with.