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What Is Disappear Completely About? Exploring the Story Behind One Of The Most Haunted Movie
Disappear Completely made its way onto Netflix earlier in April 2024. The movie is considered as one of the most disturbing movies in the recent times. Here's everything about the movie.
Netflix's vast and non-curated streaming services often feature a mix of great and terrible movies and TV shows. While some are amazing, they often get buried under a plethora of okay to horrifyingly bad titles. For horror fans, Netflix may have added one of the most disturbing films in recent times, which is Luis Javier Henaine's Disappear Completely. The movie's main character must dig deep to find the film, as he struggles with a curse that threatens to turn him into a living corpse.
Disappear Completely is a Mexican film with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and premiered in 2022 at Austin's Fantastic Fest and was added to Netflix in April 2024. Despite its success in Mexico, the film has struggled to find an audience in other countries. The reasons behind this lack of global success are unclear, but it could be due to Netflix's insufficient marketing efforts or the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.
What is Disappear Completely about?
Disappear Completely is a 2022 Mexican horror thriller film directed and co-produced by Luis Javier Henaine, who also co-wrote the film with Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes. It stars Harold Torres as Santiago, an unscrupulous tabloid photojournalist who, after visiting a crime scene, begins to gradually lose each of his five senses.
Disappear Completely premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2022. It received a theatrical release in Mexico on 29 February 2024 by Mantícora Distribución, and was released on Netflix on 12 April 2024.
The film is a psychological horror story about a photojournalist named Santiago, who falls victim to a curse after shooting a gruesome scene featuring a dead politician devoured by rats. Unbeknownst to him, Santiago's camera has captured a demonic entity trapping him in the same web as the senator he just photographed. As Santiago loses all of his five senses, the film explores themes of identity, profession, and family.
Santiago struggles with a curseband seeks a cure through various means, including doctors, shamans, and even the demon himself. His girlfriend, Marce, is pregnant with Santiago's child and wants to have a happy family. Santiago insists they are not ready, forcing her to have an abortion. This relationship with Marce and his unborn baby is crucial to Santiago's dealings with his curse. As he nears losing his eyesight, Santiago refuses to sacrifice his child's life to the demon, leaving him permanently locked in a tomb made of his own flesh.
Disappear Completely is a film that blends urban and folk horror themes, focusing on the protagonist Santiago, a cursed senator who has been harmed by a political rival. The film encourages viewers to empathize with Santiago's situation, as he loses his hearing and becomes unable to understand the sounds around him. The film ends with seven despair-inducing seconds of dark screen between the last image of Marce calling Santiago's name and the film's end credits, highlighting the film's themes of witchcraft, superstition, and politics.
Director Luis Javier Henaine aimed to create an immersive, realistic experience for audiences in Disappear Completely, focusing on personal issues and down-to-earth themes, rather than relying on jump scares or musical cues, while balancing witchcraft and folk horror.
He said, “Here in Mexico, witchcraft is something that people take very seriously and something very, very real for the majority of our population. And I like to reflect that in a way. So, all the time, I was trying to say, ‘Okay, this has to look real, this has to feel real, this has to be very realistic.’ And that's how I tried to go throughout the whole film, with the production design and with the cinematography and with everything. Our references were real things, how people behave in these environments. . . ”
Photography is the ultimate horror in Disappear Completely
Disappear Completely is a disturbing horror film that explores the plight of Santiago, a tabloid photographer who enjoys taking pictures of mangled bodies and transforming them into high art. The film also highlights Santiago's tasteless titles for his stories and his attempts to sell some of his photos to art galleries.
The film asks viewers to identify with Santiago and his plight, but also highlights his despise for his job and his attempts to make his photos into high art. The film's biggest horror is the protagonist becoming the subject of one of Santiago's photographs.
A Susan Sontag quote that opens the movie gives us the key to interpreting the story in this sense. "Photography converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, wittingly or unwittingly, are the angels of death." In Disappear Completely, a still picture is not just a tomb in a graveyard because it depicts someone who might already be dead, but because having your picture taken is already a kind of death.
Santiago is destined to become one of his own photographs, a fate that is ironic as he has condemned many dead people to a living death. Disappear Completely is a movie that explores the art of creating images and the significance of watching Santiago's downfall happen in a movie rather than reading about it in a book. The image is essential for understanding his situation.
Disappear Completely explores the themes of photography, particularly Santiago's predatory photojournalism, and its meanings. The protagonist's relationship with Marce and their unborn child is influenced by his career, as he believes it's not yet time for them to have a baby. However, when presented with the opportunity to preserve his sense of work in exchange for his child, Santiago chooses to let himself disappear completely.
Disappear Completely ultimately wraps up with a fitting conclusion for Santiago. In his infinite suffering, he decides that the world would be a better place without him, for there is no answer that would satisfyingly end his suffering. He has already done too much to be forgiven.
He’s already drowned in hubris, having been a man who mocked the death of others and who refused the happiness of the woman who lived with him. He turns the world into a cemetery and thus deserves to be buried alive.
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