‘The Attachment Diaries’ Review: Love, Sick

A trashy deal with coated in a high-art gloss, “The Attachment Diaries” gleefully kneads melodrama, noir, horror and sexual perversion right into a pathological romance between two deeply broken ladies.

The setting is Nineteen Seventies Argentina, the place a rain-soaked, apparently destitute Carla (Jimena Anganuzzi) arrives on the house of Irina (Lola Berthet), a extreme gynecologist. Carla, claiming to have been gang-raped, is searching for an unlawful abortion (her second, because it seems), however her being pregnant is simply too far alongside. Instead, Irina gives to shelter Carla till the start, then promote the kid to a rich couple. Irina, it appears, has a couple of profitable aspect hustle; she additionally has a Ph.D. in chemistry, which can serve the ladies nicely when their pathologies hit the fan and the our bodies hit the ground.

Defined by a near-tactile pressure between the profligacies of the script (by the director, Valentín Javier Diment) and the coolly reserved class of Claudio Beiza’s cinematography, “The Attachment Diaries” takes its excesses so significantly that it’s inconceivable to not snigger. As the ladies’s twisted histories and sick behaviors are slowly revealed — Carla, as an example, performs darkish experiments in decoupage, whereas Irina excels at dismemberment — Diment flirts with farce. The movie’s taproot, nevertheless, slurps insistently from a deep reservoir of misandry and rape trauma, commonalities that wrap the ladies in a cocoon of shared ache.

At as soon as lugubrious and nutty, miserable and daring, “The Attachment Diaries” unfolds, for the primary hour or so, within the softest black and white. Then, simply previous the midpoint, the display screen floods with a wealthy, golden mild, timed to coincide with Irina’s first expertise of sexual launch. Psychotic killer and star-crossed lover have simply develop into one and the identical.

The Attachment Diaries
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.