The Unburied Movie Review

Dr Maximiliano Espósito is a psychologist, struggling financially to make life work in Buenos Aires. He focuses mainly on childhood trauma, particularly to do with boys who've grown up in orphanages, which he can strongly associate with.

When he receives a call that his father has died, he decides to return to his hometown in the hope of receiving some inheritance. Arriving at the all-boys orphanage he grew up in, he's brought back to an oppressive environment of toxic masculinity, where competition between his fellow brothers is rife and wrapped up in strange ritualistic practices. As he enters the house, it's clear that Max is the one that got away, yet his siblings try to pull him back into the brotherhood. "Dad was no ordinary father", one of his brothers tells Max, as it's clear that the man who died was the patriarch of the family... and a cult too.

Max is led into the old ostentatious dining room where their father's corpse sits at the dinner table post-death. While having a dead body in the house for days appears to be a normal tradition, Max can't understand why the authorities haven't been called and insists on having a wake. With the town being small, where everyone's related, Max fast becomes the odd one out as he gets frustrated with the laid-back 'local' mentality of his brothers.

But, after reuniting with an old love, he begins to feel more at home as his former animalistic urges boil to the surface and his city boy visage fades away. A hunting trip with the boys, provides an opportunity for bonding, but that ends in an expedition that serves as unpleasant regression for Max.

There's also fierce competition between Max and one of his brothers, revealing that Max was their father's favourite. As Max becomes more familiar and accepting of his cultish past, he lets go of the judgements he arrived with, and shows that he's coming home.

The Unburied is a broody horror, where the blatantly obscene is normalised in a world driven by rich cultural traditions and rituals. Director Alejandro Cohen Arazi paints a picture of Max, a reserved, intellectual who appears to be a victim of his past, but as we delve deeper, it's clear that his compulsion and mania have just been repressed.

Arazi cleverly pulls the wool over the audience's eyes, as we're led into a sense of false security of 'everybody is strange in this little town, nobody is to be trusted and we don't like your sort around here', vibes. But as it turns out, home is where the heart is and perhaps Max has been in denial all along and needs to get real.

The Unburied is an unassuming gem, that'll will haunt you from start to finish as the story unravels the terror of ego, family customs and the downright weird.