Italian actor Asia Argento stars in Death Has No Master, a surrealist psychological thriller directed by Venezuelan-Canadian filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand, which premieres in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival next week, per theguardian.com.
The film follows Caro, an Italian-Venezuelan foreigner who returns to reclaim her inherited plantation from its local caretakers, exploring deep-rooted national tensions surrounding ownership, class, and colonialism.
The film arrives amidst heightened political tensions following a US military incursion in Venezuela that began in August, which culminated in January with the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and US seizure of the country’s oil industry. Armand noted that these real-world events amplify the film’s exploration of the “collective darkness” felt by Venezuelans regarding the betrayal of domestic and international systems.
Death Has No Master marks a thematic return to the terrain of Armand’s 2016 debut feature, La Soledad, which depicted the country’s economic collapse. While his debut focused on the struggles of squatters in a dilapidated family mansion, this latest project shifts the perspective to the landowners, drawing heavily from the director’s personal nightmares about returning to an abandoned home.
Argento revealed that she lived in isolation at the filming locations to immerse herself in the role, experiencing a primal fear that mirrored her character’s psychological state. She also noted that Caro’s late father, an abusive figure in the film, shares aspects of her own famous parents, horror director Dario Argento and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, making the performance deeply personal.
Armand designed the narrative to complicate simple moral binaries by avoiding a clear distinction between victims and villains. He explained that the conflict balances legal, moral, and historical legitimacy among its characters, concluding that land is ultimately never owned, only controlled by force.
The production of the film directly overlapped with major geopolitical shifts in South America, grounding its abstract, surrealist lens in the real-world anxieties of contemporary Venezuela.
•Featured image: Asia Argento in Death Has No Master. Photograph: La Faena
